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Beautiful building and a great example of Adaptive reuse

Nice to see such a beautiful example of Beaux-Arts Architecture is part of an Adaptive Reuse project.

Karissa Rosenfield reports for Archdaily: LAN Chosen to Revamp Paris’ Grand Palais

After a nine-month long competition, LAN Architecture has been commissioned to restructure and extend the historic Grand Palais in Paris. With the intent to “restore the building’s original coherence and sense of transparency,” LAN plans to revamp the 1900 World’s Fair building by resorting its unity and circulation, as well as the volume of its galleries around the Grand Nave and the addition of a new entrance court.

From LAN: The New Grand Palais: An Example of Modernity 

To our contemporary eyes, the Grand Palais is both an idea and a symbol of modernity. It is a hybrid building in terms of its architecture, its usage and its history. Neither a museum nor a simple monument, its architecture has an identity all its own, centered around the notion of a “culture machine,” a spatial means for hosting a vast diversity of events and audiences that exponentially exalts the site’s “universal” and “republican” vocation. The restoration and restructuring of the entire monument affords us the chance to reinforce this aspiration. The coming restructuring foresees the implementation of a new circulation mechanism centered around the middle building, the restoration of the galleries surrounding the Grand Nave, the installation of a climate control system, the creation of a logistics center, bringing the entire building up to code, and opening the large bay windows and passageways in order to restore the building’s original coherence and sense of transparency.

These interventions represent a unique opportunity to re-discover the traces and ways in which the Grand Palais has withstood the test of time, survived changes in its function, to assert architecture as a point of departure, and the space as nurturing life and society. Even though the initial reason for building the Grand Palais was to provide a site for presenting and promoting French artistic culture during the World’s Fair of 1900, the plan nevertheless envisioned durability and flexibility from the outset. Even though these many adaptations progressively complicated and depreciated certain parts of the Grand Palais, the intelligence of its general form and its original spatial intent have helped it survive these episodes and change with the times. Our credo for the New Grand Palais is to complete and strengthen its formal logic through interventions that return a sense of modernity to its whole, all the while respecting its traditional identity.

To read the whole article click here.

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