Restructuration / extension Lycée Georges-Cormier in Paris

Ateliers O-S architectes are managed by three partners with complementary characters, which often collaborate with personalities from other fields
like plastic art or landscape design. Before they develop their own common projects, Vincent Baur, Guillaume Colboc and Gaël Le Nouëne have worked with stimulating architects like Rem Koolhaas or Adriaan Geuze in Nederland.

Partners since 2002, they are involved in many international competitions where their projects are regularly remarked, like the Administrative City in Merida, the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw or the National Library Prix de la Première oeuvre du Moniteur avec le projet des «Decks Bleus», 39 logements à Chalon-sur-Saône.

In 2011 the project «Decks Bleus»is shortlisted for the prix de la première Oeuvre, Le Moniteur Architecture. Ateliers O-S architectes has been selected as one of the “Europe 40 under 40” 2014, awarding the most important and emerging young architects and designers. “O-S refers to many wordplay, in particular Open Source and Operating System, concept that synthesizes ideas of openmindedness and production required for developing a project. With this name we stand out the idea of an open team, where dialog and self expression is fundamental. For us, the amalgam of ideas and proposals is a way to support the project, to transform it and also to uncover the nature of each situation.

The project is the expression of the sensitivity of a situation, a site, a context. We search for a responsive architecture able to provide to everyone a new experience, an emotion. Through a work on the cover of the building, the texture, and the granularity but also a work on the program organization, each space, each partition becomes a place responsive to its surrounding. Worried about integration and respect of geographic specifications, our global approach offers a contextual sensitivity.

The restructuration operation of the school, one of the largest in the Region Ile-de-France, is scheduled in several phases of interventions in an occupied site. A comprehensive renovation of the obsolete heating system and a replacement of woodwork is implemented. A new maneuver
track for heavy weight driving training, a new car park, an extension workshops and classrooms are also created.

Our project aims to improve quality everyday life of users and enhance the school’s heritage. The architectural language of existing extensions is similar to the existing technical buildings. The pavilion hosting the classrooms was designed with the image of a gas station or a highway toll station. It is covered by a canopy that allows students to take shelter in when the weather changes and makes the transition between the maneuvering area and the entrance to the classroom. The large dimensions of this volume makes it a necessary landmark building in order to give a certain scale to
the building, which enables it to compete with the heavy trucks that daily travel in front of to the new building.

The extension of the building hosting the studio of agricultural machinery is designed as a new façade that enhances the existing building, like a filter, giving it a sense of unity. This is a perforated aluminum cladded façade, which is both the extension front and fence for open air parts.