Garden of an office building

Optical illusion for micro-landscape

The Massy-Palaiseau offices building, recently built, has in its core a roof slab allowing the creation of 3 135m² of growing plants spaces, exclusive of circulations.

Built on three faces, the main garden is opened on the sky and benefits of a great south/south-west orientation. This opening to the sky is converting it into a vegetal theatre that is allowing the construction of populated landscape painting, made available for daily users.

Various technical and structural difficulties must be considered in the design (lift of existing slabs, level differences of structural slabs to 6.50 meters, numerous exits and technical emergences emerging from the ground levels occupied by logistic services, offices and archive rooms, rain overflow basins, polluted lands in the core of the garden, various very high subjects we wanted to conserve).

The great size of the garden (73 meters on 43 meters) and a regular geometry allow the construction of a panorama from the great southern terrace to the end of the garden where we can find the tallest structural slabs. Thus, it is a micro-landscape in a back-lighting that is playing on the depth, the light and the acceleration of the view laying in the core of the building.

The work on depth is revealed by variations on continuation and acceleration of rates. The frame is loose near the terrace and is accelerating at the back of the garden to create an optical illusion helping to increase the view.

It is on these succession of planted mounds and grass flat surfaces, straight and parallel plant screens and thickness of a broad range of flowers with strongly marked colors (blue, red, white, orange) that are settling on stem trees and on shrubs, planted in groves or alone. The emergences we have conserved are erased and totally absorbed by the landscape. The vegetal painting is also making a great southern terrace available for the daily users, with a great possibility of paths, benches, bleachers, opened lawns and outdoor workspaces. The five rooms, built in periphery are offering specific areas that could be reserved for outdoors meetings. It can host over 12 persons. The composition of the rooms is matching with the general topic of the project. It is a complementary variation about the opening and the orientation of each micro-space, closed geometry, half-opened on the garden (also named as orientated box). The rooms are made from oak-tree trellised screens that are referring to the new interior designs of the hall and circulations.

The garden is revegetating more and more on its depth, as well as the great mineral terrace on the South is giving gradually a place to a thick nature at the back of the garden. The vegetable ranges are corresponding to BREEAM recommendations and are constituted of 70% of native species and 30% of horticultural species. At the bottom of the plants, a mulch and an automatic watering were created. Various accessories are needed for the installation of a local fauna that is why we designed nest boxes, wood piles and temporary watering place.

Due to the creation of the garden, the building is nowadays occupied by Crédit Agricole Consumer France. The company has participated to the garden design and brought the idea of a potential work outdoors with the creation of these rooms.