At the time of the construction of the railway junction between the North and South stations, from the 1950s to the 1980s, large office buildings replaced the fine-grain fabric of housing and shops, gradually transforming a mixed, lively, working-class neighborhood into a monofunctional, lifeless area that became desolate at night. Today, this project is helping to reverse this trend by reintroducing mixed-use development and residential spaces to the area.
A base asserts the project's programmatic diversity, sequences the scale of the building, and anchors it to the slope of Rue aux Choux. The folding of the facades along Rue du Marais offers more diagonal views to the dwellings on this narrow street. These folds, along with the curved openings leading to the interior garden, play with the sunlight. They create changing reflections on the sky-blue glazed brick facades, sometimes diaphanous, sometimes glimmering.
