By Robert Such. Published in World Architecture.

Between Paris and Disneyland, on a growing university campus, stands Bernard Tschumi’s Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. His trademark industrial aesthetic – which found such popularity at the Parc de la Villette in Paris – is here enhanced with ideas of fragmentation and his insistence that a building be built as a closed system.

The security guard trips the alarm, then shuts the door behind me. I’m in. Inside Bernard Tschumi’s £8m Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. The Franco-Swiss architect’s building stands isolated on a stretch of road near Cité Descartes, a 1980s suburban new town between Paris and the satellite, Disneyland, east of the capital.

A 15-minute approach on foot from the station passes Dominique Perrault’s outstanding edifice for engineering, technology and management higher education (Group ESIEE): an arc chopped out of the shallow concrete facade slopes away from the road and a traffic roundabout, made of concentric waves of cracked basalt around a sculpture representing the earth’s axis.

Further down the road is Chaix and Morel’s less impressive Ecole National des Ponts et Chaussées (the National Civil Engineering School). At the time of visiting, only the giant restaurant complex opposite and the University of Marne-la-Vallée had been built, which constituted 30 per cent of a developing campus. It is a lonely place, but Tschumi points out, “it doesn’t have critical mass yet, but will when everything is built”.

On first sight his design appears more open than the neighbouring monoliths, with different elevations, and is surrounded by tracts of land, fringed by woodland. So what role did context play? After all, Tschumi had immense freedom of expression here, without straying outside the brief.

“The building is really done from the inside out, as with almost all of them I do. I start from the inside and then it starts through the making of that very large space [which] becomes the focus of all activities,” he explains. This very large space – or ‘forum’ – sits 3.5 metres above ground, to accommodate the car park beneath, and is topped by a glass and steel sawtooth roof, the glazed rake facing north to avoid a greenhouse effect.

Eventually, for this is only phase one, users will enter via an existing south side flight of steps, which presently take visitors up to a temporary glass wall. Remembering that work is only half complete is essential in order to make sense of some of the otherwise strange external and internal logic.

Readily discernible, however, is that the facilities for administration and research, and the media library, are distanced from the nuts and bolts of teaching by the enormous forum, which serves as exhibition space, cafeteria and reception. For Tschumi, this 25 x 90 metre area is ‘unprogrammed’, as it can be appropriated for whatever use the clients has in mind. (At the time of construction the clients were the ministry of culture, which was managing French architectural education – it tends to jump back and forth between the ministry of culture and the ministry of education – and the public authorities of Marne-la-Vallée.)

Dominating the void is a box-like envelope on eight pilotis, which houses two lecture theatres – one 90-seat and one 130-seat – divided by a moveable partition. The top terrace of beech parquet is again ‘unprogrammed’.

Seams dividing up the expanded stainless steel skin do not reflect internal distribution, but resulted from the fact that it was preferable to go with, instead of against, the wave-shaped pattern when cutting, thus putting technical considerations at the heart of its design. “I never work with aesthetic reasons [except
when choosing the type of wood],” Tschumi points out.

Galleries of galvanised steel grillwork surround the forum on three sides, the cool tones counterpointed by the warm glow of perforated beech wood panelling. Seminar and jury/pin-up rooms alternate with the workshops, which extend over two levels; the main deck, mezzanine and central column all in the same ubiquitous light-coloured concrete.

In terms of textures and materials, Tschumi included transparent and translucent glass – frosted and smooth, channelled or plain – and-smooth plaster renderings. Chairs, lighting and all-beech furniture were conceived by him. Metals are milled, polished, or lacquered. Diamond-patterned, lacquered, folded steel wraps completely around the four-storey volume on the south-west corner, going indoors and outdoors, playing with notions of autonomy and inclusion.

Long, inclined stairways link the different levels. That their orientation seems wrong with respect to the present access only adds to the feeling of a poorly assembled puzzle – but only if we forget that it is awaiting completion – which continues on the outside where the dialogue between elements is disjointed. “It’s never a closed system…You never contain it. You always leave gaps, interstices. It’s never about synthesis. It’s always about certain fractures. So that the fractures are generally all intentional. It’s not like Norman Foster who will always try to close the system. I always try to leave it open,” he says.

As the architect known for the bright red follies in Parc de la Villette (1985) in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, which as an industrial landscape of activity breaks from the parks of relaxation of the 18th and 19th century, Tschumi has once again returned to industry and dynamism. “I don’t mind industrial. I’ve always liked industrial,” he says. “Our project starts from the following thesis: there are building-generators of events. They are often condensers of the city; as much through their programmes as through their spatial potential they accelerate a cultural or social transformation that is already in progress.”

Tschumi’s plans for phase two of the building include a glassed in open-air chamber that will give access to sub-level one. People will be able to congregate here out of the wind, in relative silence, and beneath the sky. Also on the drawing board is a 400-seat auditorium and material experimentation laboratory.

And how does Bernard Tschumi feel about the building’s influence on the next generation of young architects? “Winston Churchill said that we form buildings and buildings form us… I studied in an amazing Neo-Classical [one], unbelievably beautiful, by Gottfried Semper [1803-79] and I don’t know if it had any effect on me, except that the spaces were astonishing – but it was Neo-Classical…which is the furthest away from what I do,” he concludes.

By Robert Such. Published in World Architecture.

“It was the most impossible site for a law court,” says Christian de Portzamparc, architect of the Palais de Justice in Grasse, on the French Riviera. “It’s absolutely not balanced, not symmetrical… not simple, and not seeable from the city… so it’s a paradox to do a law court there.” But he managed.

When approaching Grasse, a sizeable town of red-tiled roofs climbing up the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes, it is easy to see how context plays a major role. Grasse possesses some of the tacky, glittering pastiche of nearby Cannes and Nice, but without the jet set. Voluminous pines and tall, slender cypresses rub shoulders with a provincial mix of Italianate-style 19th-century Classicism, and a palette of citrus colours.

The palais lies downhill from the old medieval centre, with its alleyways that are often too narrow to swing the proverbial cat. From roads tacking their way up and down the hillside in a series of hairpin bends, the first sign of the building is its pinkish key-shaped roof. Seven main sections of open-jointed terracotta-coloured concrete slabs perform a dual purpose: to give protection from the relentless sun, while allowing air circulation between it and the flat, waterproof roof below, and to hide the lift mechanisms and air conditioning equipment.

Portzamparc carried off the top prize in an open competition in 1993. The local authorities had acquired industrial land and were looking to move judicial business from ancient seats in the centre to a more modern and larger setting.

Not everything went smoothly. “Lunches are important,” observes Portzamparc, referring to the give-and-take approach of building contractors. “Many things you decide through talking with them and you slowly lose the relation with the plan… I had to modify the project sometimes because they had made mistakes.” He recounts how the stucco on the facade needed to be redone several times before it hid the uneven concrete surface.

His comment about the impossibility of the location is well founded – a busy road ties the site up in a noose. On the west side of the loop is a high polygonal-masonry wall and an ornately decorated ex-Chiris perfume factory. On the south side, contemporary constructions typify a ridiculous pastiche of the ubiquitous Romanesque style. As Portzamparc notes: “The law court exists and at the same time is integrated… It’s important to do that in honest architecture, to make something which is not neo-Provençal.”

Two entrances, front and rear, feed into the salle des pas perdus (waiting hall). Within the long, marbled hall – a perfect space for pacing – single or paired concrete columns, serving as perspective markers, alternate with rows of tapered wooden posts which act as sun-breaks, splintering sunlight and creating a zebra pattern that resembles the one seen on the sunlit avenues in Grasse. “The salle des pas perdus is a sort of mirror, or double, of the garden of plane, palm and cypress trees outside,” says the Moroccan-born architect.

On each floor is a corridor that runs down the spine of the building, linking the commercial court, conciliation board and high court of justice in the elliptical building to the three blocks along the axis.

The ellipse, one of Portzamparc’s favourite motifs, works well here and complements the curve of the street that wraps itself around the western boundary. The dynamic sense of flow is also captured inside, with the looped walkway and lower part of the split-level ground floor bringing to mind a cavern carved out by a river swirling about, eroding and sculpting.

To achieve the external, rough-concrete ellipsoid shell, he returned to the quarry from where the stone for the old wall had been extracted, “to show that it is possible to be in agreement with the site”.

He did not intend the complex to resemble a fortification, yet it does. But while small square openings — with their jambs, head and sill splayed towards the interior of the courtrooms — in the curved wall give the impression of being in a fort, they also ape a gallery wall of ephemeral, urban snapshots.

All the courtrooms, from the more sombre to the well lit, have natural light by either zenithal light wells or tall, narrow windows behind the bench. Variations in atmosphere are created by a wide range of textures, tints and contrast: colourful and sober shades of stucco; olive-green, translucent and clear glass; and a number of concrete finishes.

Furniture is by Elizabeth de Portzamparc, interior designer of the National Assembly’s Information Centre and Café de la Musique at Parc de la Villette. Here, she mixes and matches the warm and cool hues of sycamore, beech and dyed leather with the dark Brazilian rosewood court room portals.

As the state requires that any of its new buildings receive artistic input, Jacques Martinez became involved in the scheme. His 21 paintings – with an orange, leafy theme – are hung high up in the salle des pas perdus in the hope that rather than studying their feet people will look up at his work – and, hopefully, at the architecture too.