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Architects: Marc Mimram
- Area: 65000 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Erieta Attali
Text description provided by the architects. The Agro Paris Tech campus finds a great coherence, both in its representation on the Plateau de Saclay, in the internal links and paths, and in its constructive definition.
The eight buildings that make up the campus are arranged around a huge two-hectare garden. The Forum, an airy glass block that serves as a showcase, an orangery, a learning center, and a versatile space that can be used for a range of different purposes, connects the public space and the garden and forms the starting point for a covered arcade that leads to all the buildings, joining together a string of meeting places and relaxation areas against a background of greenery.
Along this two-story “Galerie des Savoirs”, lecturers, researchers, postgraduates, and undergraduates will be able to enjoy friendly spaces laid out between the different buildings and facing the garden. Research blocks, teaching blocks, and training blocks form an open cluster whose components are all interconnected, linking the different sections of the campus and creating a sense of serendipity for a diverse range of users.
The forum building marks the place of the institution on campus. It opens generously, welcomes students and researchers, and develops transparency between living areas, teaching spaces, and the garden. This glass and steel building revisits places of light and transparency by establishing a direct relationship between daily practices, the environment, and vegetation. It is a vast volume occupied by the major shared programs: the hall, the students' common room, the media library… It is in the "hall" that settles a climate conducive to collaborative work, fortuitous encounters, spontaneous experimentation, etc.
The garden, at the heart of the project, extends to the north and constitutes as many patios between the teaching buildings which form a unitary but fragmented, coherent, and permeable facade to the north. The Agro Paris Tech campus opens between the city and nature. The links between the different components of the school, teaching, research, and administration are ensured by a covered gallery that constitutes two levels of a path and a link between the components of the program.
This gallery forms a facade on the garden, open to the south, which runs through the project between the Forum building and the teaching buildings, and extends to include the research buildings. New teaching methods are easily developed for the pleasure of all, the students who settle there, the teachers who meet them, and the researchers who initiate them.
We have given substance to the institution by basing its representation on its materiality, between sky and earth. Two materials symbolize it: the glass for the Forum building and the earth to gives substance to the buildings. We have developed a form of lasting massiveness for the campus buildings based on an earth concrete architecture that varies according to its origins and its implementations and gives the cladding a living and vibrant appearance according to the lights, orientations, and seasons. The attention to the layouts, to the proportions, to the assemblies of earthen materials offer a permanent but innovative architecture, attentive to the environment and anchored in its territory.
