How do you breathe new life into a dilapidated modernist campus or a traditional French village? Ask Paris-based Périphériques.

The French group Périphériques – founded in 1998 by Anne-Françoise Jumeau, Emmanuelle Marin and David Trottin – is not a traditional architecture firm but a cooperative body of varying composition whose ‘office’ is a website. Those involved, all of whom have their own firms, speak of a ‘label’ of architects. Besides architecture, the group designs exhibitions, writes books and publishes IN-EX magazine. With respect to their alternating roles, they say: ‘We see architecture as a vast territory that extends from conception to communication.’

Like New Wave filmmakers, the architects see themselves as auteurs, but also as intermediaries: ‘We claim the right to call ourselves “architecture producers”.’ Périphériques also collaborates with foreign architects – as one of only a few French firms to do so – in designing competition entries, such as a plan for the Musée des Arts Premiers in Paris, a joint effort with MVRDV. The group puts architecture at the centre of current events: ‘Our projects are expressions of contemporary creativity, in which digital cultures lend new meaning to terms like “auteur”, “oeuvre” and “context”. Collecting, remixing, cutting and pasting give the word “creation” a new foundation.’

The name Périphériques refers to areas surrounding the historical centres of French cities. Although sometimes marked by violence, these areas, where the young architects started their careers of necessity, often radiate a sense of raw energy. The name also indicates the position that the three designers hold within French architecture, for they are, or were, active on the periphery of the conservative beaux-arts tradition, which represents a sphere dominated by state-subsidized projects. Whereas the average French architect, living and working in Paris, city of museums, irritably rejects the carpet of sprawl in the new suburbs as a disastrous Anglo-Saxon influence, David Trottin has stated in no uncertain terms on his website that he embraces this architectural reality as an interesting and incontrovertible urban fact. His is an attitude rarely found in France: an acceptance of reality that invariably harbours the elements required for the development of a new architecture.

Symphony of Colour in Jussieu

Having gained enough recognition to command centre stage on occasion, virtual firm Périphériques has been receiving prestigious inner-city commissions such as that for a building on the campus of Jussieu University in Paris. Périphériques is a network, not an office; Jussieu is a network, not a building. Surely it can be no coincidence that of all possible groups, this particular team of architects won the competition for a new building on a campus that dates from 1968. Initially built for 20,000 students, the complex designed by architect Edouard Albert now serves some 45,000. Situated close to the Seine, Périphériques’ new building, which accommodates classrooms and a library, is part of an urgently needed extension of the tired, unwelcoming campus.

The biggest challenge lay in fitting a new building into an existing modernist grid without repeating Albert’s errors, which had led to a sense of endlessness, an ‘impossible to inhabit’ university, students gone astray, and so forth. The architects met the challenge by adopting the organization of Albert’s campus only roughly. The casually drawn lines of their new façades bulge beyond those of the rational grid; the floors slope here and there; and rather than dismal inner courtyards, a vast roofed atrium with a crisscross of footbridges lies at the hub of the various volumes. As the beating heart of the building, the atrium is a place where students meet and where an all-encompassing palette of bold colours (on walls, floors and ceilings) creates a part-carnival, part-pop atmosphere. Périphériques has responded to the limitations of the older architecture with a building that reaches out, that invents a new scale, that adds relief to the picture.

Another striking aspect of the building, which was completed in mid-2006, is a façade clad in a lacy aluminium grid dotted with circles. The grid works as a filter that both tempers the sunlight and softens the view of two pathetic office buildings by architect Urbain Cassan. Périphériques solved the problem of a difference in height between street and building by giving the existing 4-m-high base of the complex a coat of red paint and having it slope down to street level in a fluid line. Like a gigantic mouth, the open red entrance level literally swallows up students walking into the building. This element of the design appears to be a tribute to the prizewinning (albeit unrealized) plan for a Jussieu University library, which Rem Koolhaas submitted in 1992, a design based on a stack of interconnected platforms.

The roof of the central atrium consists of a transparent system of inflated Texlon cushions. Below the roof is a metal safety net, a springy surface strong enough to walk on, which caps a 40-m-deep void. Installing this net in a university building – a piece of equipment straight from the world of the circus – where students will regularly spot maintenance staff balancing on the mesh expanse above their heads, is a bit of fun, but also a deliberate provocation. Indeed, the building can be seen as a daring architectural circus act that teeters on the brink of what is permissible and what is not. All corridors and classrooms, for instance, are colour-coded in incredible shades of gangrene green, piglet pink, yowling yellow and barely bearable blue. Staying in one of these rooms for more than a few minutes must be intolerable. It’s easy to imagine colour-frazzled students and teachers – a group that in France is prepared to protest against far lesser crimes – grabbing brushes and cans of paint and neutralizing the riotous rainbow with a coat of whitewash. It would be just the kind of user intervention that Périphériques would take in its stride. ‘We tried to make a building that would be raw, strong and compact, that would give a spatial and sensory shock, that would stir up energy and emotion.’

These architects, who claim ‘to rely on artificial ways to discover processes that allow for the construction of strange things’, have concerns completely unrelated to user-friendliness. Like the trapeze artist, they are out to dazzle an audience that gapes and stares in amazement upon entering one of their buildings. They employ an architectural shock therapy, apparently compulsory in France, that is also pursued by others, such as Rudi Ricciotti. The acceptance of this blaring symphony of colour, even in classrooms, by a serious Parisian university board must have amused the architects to the point of hilarity. All assumptions aside: you can’t have a successful circus without clown acts, and within the dull and dreary architecture of France, a bit of buffoonery is of vital importance.

Haphazardly Rearranged Volumes

The 310-m2 GO House that Périphériques built in Thionville, close to the France-Luxembourg border, uses the existing urban reality in an ironic-critical process of deconstruction-reconstruction. The neighbourhood consists of large, detached houses centred on relatively small lots. As was the case in Jussieu, rather than rejecting the existing situation, the architects used it as the point of departure for their design. In so doing, they aimed for neither osmosis nor consensus. Périphériques believes the occupant should be able to express himself through his house. Consequently, urban space can no longer be continuous; in fact, it should become discontinuous. The GO House looks as though the designers have dismantled a typical house from the neighbourhood and reassembled the pieces haphazardly – floors, exterior walls, terraces and roof – to make a new house. The result is an architectural form that fits into the neighbourhood only because the overall mass corresponds to what is normally built here, yet the building is radically innovative. The organization of the interior, for example, is nothing like that of nearby houses. The living room of the metal, glass and concrete GO House is on the top floor, where it has more light and a better view. Filling one corner of this volume is a terrace that serves as a natural extension of the living room. The floor below accommodates the master bedroom, and a separate studio flat for guests is located on the ground floor. Neutral areas of the interior are bathed in light, which is filtered to one degree or another, and have white acrylic-resin floors and walls. Red accents are found in both stairwell and bathroom.

Having said that every architect exposes something of himself in a building, Trottin gave this one a complicated system of stairways – a reference to the mysterious houses he lived in as a boy. Setting the simple volume in motion are telescopically fitted storeys and slanted walls. Exterior walls consist of a double layer of translucent Profilit glass. A metal footbridge leading to the front door gives GO House a ship-like character, thus creating an even greater distance between the residence and the street.

© Steven Wassenaar

http://www.peripheriques-architectes.com