✕

Launched in 1991, Paris’s gargantuan Seine Rive Gauche redevelopment concerns 320 acres of former railroad sidings stretching southeast along the river from the Gare d’Austerlitz to the city limits. Since some of the tracks are still in use, the planners covered them with a giant concrete platform, and ran the new neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, Avenue de France, down the middle of it. Initially programmed to feature housing, shops, and a lot of offices, the project switched tack in the late 1990s, following a major slump in the office-rental market. To take up the slack, the city earmarked a large sector of the project for higher education, aiming to create a “new Latin Quarter” in the 13th arrondissement. Over three decades later, development of Seine Rive Gauche is still ongoing, but recently came a step closer to completion with the inauguration of the University of Chicago’s John W. Boyer Center.

The main entry to the Boyer Center along Rue des Grands Moulins. Photo © Fabrice Fouillet

Occupying part of a city block on Avenue de France, the center is the first French project completed by Chicago-based Studio Gang, which opened a Paris office in 2017. For this operation, the firm teamed up with local firm Parc Architectes, which also designed the housing (not yet completed) that occupies the remainder of the city block. Present in Paris for many years, UChicago previously rented premises of 7,000 square feet, but in its new home has more than tripled that figure to 25,500 square feet, allowing it to expand its study-abroad program from 75 to 125 students. “Now we can have multiple activities going on at the same time, which was impossible before,” says Sébastien Greppo, the center’s executive director. In addition to classrooms, the building contains a research hub, a lecture hall, staff offices, and the top-floor Great Room.

Faced with a compact site, Studio Gang had no choice but to pile all these functions on top of each other. Nonetheless, as founder Jeanne Gang explains, “we wanted to create a campus feeling similar to that at the university’s Chicago premises, where students move from building to building between classes.” In Paris, this idea has translated into a generous, top-lit, stair-filled atrium, which Gang hopes will foster “serendipitous connections between researchers, faculty, and students, creating a fertile place for academic study and ideas.”

1

2

The Center was designed as a vertical campus, with classrooms and other spaces oriented around a central atrium. Photos © Corentin Lespagnol (1) and Fabrice Fouillet (2)

Entered from a side street, the L-plan building gives onto a courtyard at its rear, which it shares with Parc’s housing. The nature of the concrete platform underneath strongly conditioned both the building’s form and its structure. Supported at only six points—which correspond to the platform’s pillars—the Boyer Center features a steel-framed ground floor that cantilevers over a street-level railroad exit located at its outer corner. On top of the steel, mounted on shock absorbers to counter train vibration, a mass-timber frame rises a further four stories on the avenue and three on the side street. Partly chosen for its low-carbon virtues, the wood frame also respects the need to reduce weight. Furthermore, the change in height, which helps maximize sun penetration into the courtyard, also reduces load on a weaker part of the foundations, as well as allowing for a roof terrace that can be accessed from the Great Room. Though the building’s cost has not been disclosed, meeting these engineering challenges must have accounted for a significant percentage of the total.

Photo © Fabrice Fouillet

Made of prefabricated timber panels fitted with generous fenestration, the facades are partially dissimulated on the street and the avenue by a screen of “stone sticks,” as Gang describes them—hollow limestone colonnettes fixed onto cores of steel and fiberglass. “Back home, UChicago is known for its neo-Gothic limestone buildings,” explains Gang. “We wanted to connect the university’s tradition of stone architecture to Paris, which is also historically a limestone city.” More than merely decorative, the colonettes provide privacy and sun-shading, as well, as one suspects, as distracting from the rather randomly composed elevations. Their effect is compellingly graphic, especially when the building is viewed obliquely.

3

4

The Center's Great Room (3) and lecture hall (4). Photos © Fabrice Fouillet

Inside, classrooms and other functions are disposed north and south of the central atrium, whose Escheresque stair winds its convoluted way up toward the saw-toothed roof that floods it with overhead light. Abundant lateral glazing ensures views into both classrooms and the generous landings on each floor, which Gang hopes will encourage serendipitous mixing. It seems, however, that budget restrictions forced the firm to make choices: while cash was clearly spent on the atrium and the facade, the corridors and classrooms appear basic and spartan, with depressingly harsh electric lighting. Fortunately, given the center’s ambitious public program of talks, colloquia, round tables, and study days, the lecture hall and the Great Room—a handsome, double-height space with sweeping views—are far more appealing. Together with the soigné entrance, which features an installation by Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis, they will help UChicago’s ambition of fostering a thriving new intellectual hub in Paris’s 21st-century Latin Quarter.

Photo © Fabrice Fouillet

Click site plan to enlarge

Click section to enlarge