Brussels Architecture Prize | Baukunst + Bruther, Saclay [Extra Muros]
In the heart of the Paris-Saclay cluster – a miniature French-style Silicon Valley that has been under construction for a decade in the south-west of Paris – Stéphanie Bru and Alexandre Theriot (Bruther), in association with Adrien Verschuere (Baukunst), completed the Rosalind Franklin university residence in the autumn of 2020. Fitting the two parts of the programme – 192 social student housing units with common areas and commercial premises; a partly reversible underground and open-air car park with 491 spaces – in the same building in a U-shape around a shared garden, the project is striking for its strange mixture of aesthetic intransigence, structural commitment and spatial generosity.
“This is a bold experimental approach to a traditional academic programme, with shops and offices at street level, and with two floors of multistorey parking above them forming the base for student residences organized around a garden court. The architecture has a permanence that gives the project a monumental quality that cuts across the provisional nature of the content which might one day see the parking spaces repurposed.” – Deyan Sudjic
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