PRD

MONTPARNASSE

The Montparnasse hub was a new type of urbanism, a radially integrated and overlapping cluster of programs, public spaces and transit infrastructure boldly inserted into Paris’ Left Bank. Its heroically scaled architecture blocked the historic city from view for arriving train passengers -- a billboard announcing a hopeful and modernist future. Yet its promise of the connected city has not been realized. Instead of a vitality born from density, much of the site is underused and unloved. The Jardin Atlantic is out of sight and out of mind to the public, circulation through and around the site is disorienting, and leasable spaces are outdated and undesirable to contemporary tenants.

With the benefit of half a century of reflection on this site and the opportunity now to imagine a new future, its original ambitions nonetheless seem as relevant as ever. The sustainable city of the 21st century must embrace mass transit, celebrate public space, promote walkability through density and link the workplace to the public realm. As the central building within the Montparnasse development, the renovation of the PRD building has a unique opportunity to catalyze this vision and the ambitions of the master plan and new developments surrounding it --bringing transit, public space, and workspace into a new equilibrium.

Both iconic and unnoticed, the existing building’s heroically-scaled architecture is a modernist paradox that must undergo radical surgery to become relevant again. With business models changing, and the future of work unknown, the most enduring investments into the building will be those that enhance its natural assets.

The main principles of the renovation proposal are to improve its proximity to landscape and transit, upgrade its breathtaking 360-degree views and light, and celebrate its enormous scale. The lobby of the building is thickened and stitched into a new rooftop landscape, which provides building tenants with a three-story dynamic zone of indoor and outdoor amenities. A rooftop urban farm crowns the tower - a new icon for Paris. A condensed core provides more flexible and open workspaces, with through-spaces bathed in light from both sides of the tower. Double height spaces and outdoor terraces provide opportunities for interconnected floors, a range of scales for flexible uses, and a celebration of remarkable views of Paris.

A new sawtooth glass façade takes advantage of the building’s length and underlying gridded abstraction to produce a subtly changing fragmented reflection as one moves around it and over the course of the day. With contemporary glass performance and façade design that allows more light and transparency than was possible in the 1960s, the building becomes more modern than the modernism it promised.