The Building by Adrien Fainsilber
Adrien Fainsilber (1932 to 2023) · 1980 to 1986
Seen from the park the Cité is a long grey and blue box, sitting in water like a ship in a dock, with three tall greenhouses of clear glass hung on its south face and the silver sphere of the Géode floating in front. Bridges cross the moats to the entrances. It is huge, roughly the size of the Pompidou Centre four times over, and yet the water, the glass and the reflections make it feel oddly light. Adrien Fainsilber built all this inside a structure he did not design: the concrete skeleton of a national meat market whose builders had given up in 1974 after spending a fortune.
Fainsilber kept the giant frame with its rows of concrete columns and added three ideas to bring it to life. Water: the building stands in moats that surround it and drop the ground level, so that light reaches the lower floors. Vegetation: the three bioclimatic greenhouses, each a cube of glass about thirty two metres on a side, are hung from the structure with a then novel system of glass panes fixed only at their corners, engineered with Peter Rice, and they bring the park into the building. Light: two rotating cupolas on the roof, each seventeen metres across, track the sun and pour daylight down into the central halls.
The Cité opened on 13 March 1986, inaugurated by President Mitterrand as one of his grand projects, and it was the first of them to be finished. Look for the exposed steel trusses inside, the escalators that climb through the full height of the hall and the way the greenhouses appear as walls of light behind the exhibition floors. Fainsilber's building was one of the great feats of French high tech architecture, and it still feels newer than its age.
Did You Know? The glass corner fixings developed for the greenhouses here became the ancestor of the frameless structural glazing now used on buildings all over the world.
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