Lifestlye
SIMPLY LIVING FRANCE
PAGE 10
Station F: A technology campus that actually has class
I
was surprised by my reaction to Station F, the world’s biggest start-up campus, a mammoth almost 54,000–square-foot structure in Paris. This sucker is huge. It is slightly longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall. I’ve seen a lot of technology-focused buildings in Southern California, and they generally have about as much charm as a suburban hospital. Would Paris come up with something that lame? Thank God, no! This thing really grabbed me. It has a long history of being a home to innovation. The entrepreneur who created Station F, Xavier Niel, intended to build a facility for the innovators who will
create the future, while paying homage to an innovator of the past. And I think he succeeded. The original building was a railway freight terminal called La Halle Freyssinet, named after structural and civil engineer Eugene Freyssinet who designed it in the 1920s. Freyssinet employed many techniques that were viewed as innovative in his day. After it ceased to be used as a freight terminal, there were times when it might have been demolished but the structure is now protected as a national monument. The renovation to turn La Halle Freyssinet into Station F, shows genuine respect for the original industrial character of the space and you can feel it. The low-key nod to Freyssinet is even subtly reflected in the cafe out front, the Anticafe, with its exposed steel structural members and industrial-style lighting. I spent some time in the Anticafe to see if the vibe there was about the same as what I have sensed in the cafes where tech workers set up their laptops in San Francisco and San Jose. Yes, it was.
