The decision in the 90s to extend the TGV high-speed Paris-London railway to Lille was the trigger for radical transformation of this city in the north-eastern tip of France. The hub of new development was the station. OMA’s masterplan for the TGV station with shops, offices, parking, hotels, residential buildings, concert and conference halls created a nucleus unto itself, not so much linked to its immediate context as providing a broad service offering on a wider European scale.
The mega-structures and huge container-volumes stand somewhere between architecture and urban planning, set apart from the surrounding urban landscape.
The Euravenir office tower designed by LAN occupies the last free plot of the Euralille1 masterplan. It represents a significant break with the 1990s approach to development.
Its basic tenet - a key feature in the winning of the competition - is to create a link with the existing urban context, and be an essential go-between connecting four different segments of Lille: the Euralille station, the old town, the cemetery and a residential quarter.
The Euravenir block moves away from the original Euralille concept and embraces a functional programme that follows the rules and constraints imposed by the existing urban environment, and not the other way round. The plot lies at the intersection of two primary roads, the city’s Périphérique, or ring road, and Rue du Faubourg de Roubaix. The tower’s shape is the result of extending the surrounding urban axes into the plot and removing segments of the volume formed by their intersection. As a result, the tower also serves to mark the end of another major thoroughfare, Avenue Le Corbusier.
The office interiors - distributed around a central nucleus containing plant and equipment - adapt to the chiselled tower block. The restaurant and other ground floor environments are topped by a double height “void” between the first and...
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Designing a Pompidou Exhibition
Bernard Tschumi Architects
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