OUTSIDE THE BOX / OFFICE

^{Rice Option Studio
XDGA, Spring 2019}


Within La Peripherique, Paris is a monolithic built environment. Four stories of apartments sit on top of a base of shops. A thick roof concealing a final unit caps it off.

Peppered across the cityscape are courtyards, gardens, and plazas, providing breaks from this rhythm.

In the plazas you find monuments. The Centre Pompidou is an example, but a paradoxical one. It stands out as a monument because of its incongruous tectonics and proportions, and the Place Georges Pompidou plaza that lends it a stand-alone figuration.

It is here, facing the Pompidou from across its plaza, OUTSIDE THE BOX, one of ten projects within a larger master plan for the whole block, seeks to further the dialogue between icon and infill, singularity and system, through the creation of a set of programmatic, formal, and tectonic contrasting strata in a public business park.

Two prisms sit on a whimsical faceted surface intended to encourage play. The surface slopes down to allow access from the pedestrian ring road and baloons up to host lobby, commercial, and club functions. The prism on the inside of the site, hosting coworking space, touches down on the surface. The office cube on the outside floats off from surface, perched on an array of columns, and faces down the Pompidou.