The Moats and the Bioclimatic Greenhouses
Adrien Fainsilber with engineer Peter Rice (Fainsilber 1932 to 2023; Rice 1935 to 1992) · 1986
Walk around the outside of the Cité and you find that it sits in water. Deep basins run along the flanks of the building, crossed by bridges, with fountains playing in them and the lower floors opening on to the water through walls of glass. On the south side, facing the park, three enormous cubes of clear glass are hung against the facade like lanterns. Together the moats and the greenhouses are what make this vast building feel open rather than oppressive, and they are worth a walk in their own right before or after the exhibitions.
The moats were Fainsilber's answer to a practical difficulty. The abattoir shell he inherited had two floors below the level of the park, and by cutting the ground away around it and filling the resulting trench with water he gave those floors daylight and views, and turned the building into an island. The greenhouses were more radical. Each is a cube about thirty two metres on a side, glazed with large panes held only at the corners by small steel fittings, so that the walls look almost entirely made of glass. The engineer Peter Rice, who had worked on the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, developed the system, and it was one of the first uses of what is now called structural glazing.
The greenhouses were meant to hold plants and to buffer the climate of the building, and they still frame the views out to the Géode and the park. Look at them from inside on the upper floors, where the escalators run alongside, and from outside at dusk when they glow. The fountain in the basin, a spherical sculpture that throws water in a ring, is a favourite of children waiting for their timed slot.
Did You Know? The steel fittings that hold the greenhouse glass at its corners were so novel in the 1980s that engineers came from abroad just to study them.
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