14 - Résidence Chris Marker

14 - Résidence Chris Marker - Eric Lapierre Experience - 2017

146 Rue de la Tombe Issoire, Paris

Eric Lapierre is an architect and theoretician of architecture, the founder of Eric Lapierre Experience (ELEx), a Paris based office that coordinates both practice and writing. Lapierre has overall been more productive in his writings, and his work has been related to the expressive potential of construction and materiality of buildings, the relationship between tradition and modernity, architecture and works of art.

The student residence is the largest in Paris and was completed in 2017. In addition to the residence, the building’s program also includes a car park for eight public transport lines in Paris. The residence built above the bus center, is a large bar 100m long and 30m high, which houses 400 students. It is a very dense linear structure, cut by a diagonal that creates voids dedicated to collective life and circulation. Two functions whose difficult coexistence is solved in the diagonal crosses in the main facades. The main facade also shows the distribution in the complex: the expressive play derives from the plan, dominated by a weaving line shown in the facade in the form of triangular concrete elements made in situ. This element is key in the experience: it is from local fire regulations that these forms derive, an elevation of an ordinary, almost banal element made poetic.

The intention was to “communicate the domestic monumentality of a community of 400 people through an architectural expression on the level of this large group”. The project is conceived as an extension of the Cité Universitaire, from an urban and architectural point of view, in relation to some surrounding masterpieces of modern architecture (Fondation Suisse, Maison du Brésil, Collège Néerlandais, Maison de l’Iran). This context is for him an opportunity to revisit certain elements of modernity and to affirm that we can, in the present conditions, try to be modern: to search for a rational basis for architecture, to produce specific typological research, to face the question of novelty and to refuse nostalgia, so often present in contemporary architectural production. 68