ECDM (Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec) delivered in 2023 in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine), for SNC Fontaine Asnières, project owner, the transformation of a former France Telecom telephone exchange into an office building. Surface area: 4,202 m² SDP. Cost: €10.8 million without tax. Communicated.
Conservation is the starting point of the project. It is a cultural prerequisite as much as an environmental attitude. We start from a heritage, an object – more infrastructure than a building -, a product of an era, a marker of technology. The legacy is a concrete block, urban bunker that housed a now obsolete switch center. The machines had to be heavy, bulky, protected from sight and light.
The legacy is massive, sturdy, dense, as wide as it is tall: 24 by 24 meters clad in thick, prefabricated concrete facades with few openings.
Here, concrete is simultaneously memory, matrix and structure. This material speaks to us of time, tells us a story of progress, a story of past industry. From this memory, we inherit geometrized, organized, woven forms, not sparing in material, more than sober in decoration.
In this place charged with gray energy, our intervention was intentionally sober in contrast to an important programmatic transformation. It was about installing current uses and practices in characterized and obsolete spaces, installing our time in another, creating a link between two eras: after industry, services; after the workplace, the office but always work as permanence.
So we started projecting being part of a story to be extended. Being an architecture whose essence is time, we put sustainability at the heart of our reflections as an aesthetic position. This work of support and flexion made it possible to restore the place while preserving material, implementation and gray energy.
Sustainable architecture is above all long-lasting architecture, plastic architecture that can be adapted to a chosen living environment. So we reformatted, reused, adapted an inherited story, limiting intervention on the hard, the tough, the brutal. This is again an aesthetic position paving the way for other transgressions to come in a story of which we will not know the end. Passing the baton briefly.
Thus our project is an architecture inscribed in another, in which optimism and progress are to be transcended like a demilitarized fortress or a desecrated church. In short, it is less about surfaces than volumes, much less about an office than a space of freedom offered to disobedience.