Located on the edge of the Saclay Plateau and the Bièvre Valley, the HEC campus has a privileged location. The 138-hectare park features prestigious sports facilities, a vast forest area and a plateau inhabited by buildings from 1962 and designed by the architect René Coulon. Martin Duplantier first delivered the MBA building with David Chipperfield in 2012, on the edge of the forest, opposite the farm fields on the Saclay plateau.

By renovating and densifying the residential park, the office worked on the heart of the cam-pus and its modernist DNA: buildings on stilts, oriented east-west, floating in the trees and free from any vis-à-vis.
The new housing revisits these founding ingredients while giving them a new modernity.
The project presents a heritage approach with an innovative vision of the campus.

New Buildings
It is a question of integrating and reinterpreting the particularities of the original buildings, coming to establish themselves in a system already in place.
Loggias, piles and porosity of the ground floor are all qualities to highlight, which we decided to take inspiration in the design of the new building, the intervention of rehabilitation tying on its side to preserve them.

The new buildings are projected on 4 floors with piles, oriented parallel to the existing ones. The ground floor is left unoccupied.
The residences are all equipped with loggias, taking again the theme of the existing, while offering rooms the intrinsic qualities of this space.

The single rooms are made up of a living space of 16.5 sqm and a loggia 1m deep. 
The PMR rooms occupy two frames and are suitable for conversion into T1 as well as T2. 
A removable partition system makes it possible to separate the bedroom from the living room. The T2s occupy the south end of the building and thus benefit from a triple orientation. 
The opening of the common room occupied by the kitchen makes it possible to animate the gables, as well as the spinning balcony, which makes it possible to break with the bi-oriented system of a typical typology of bar.

The structure, unlike existing buildings, is made of beam poles to ensure maximum flexibility. As typologies are changed, various rooms can be set up at little cost.
The façade matrix represents the best answer to a possible evolution of these typologies.

Data Sheet

Location: Campus HEC Paris, Jouy-en-Josas (78) 
Dates: Delivery of the first phase on 03-201. Phase 2 in progress
Client: ADIM Concept  
Design Team: Martin Duplantier Architectes, EVP (structure), Artelia
Mission: Design conception and delivery of completed projects 
Surface: 2 042 sqm, (192 new student housing, common areas, offices, places of life)                         Budget: 9,4 M€ 

About MDA

Born in 1979 in Bayonne, of Franco-Belgian roots, Martin Duplantier grew up between Bordeaux and the United States. He earned his four-year degree from the HEC in 2003 and his Masters from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris – Malaquais in 2007.

Engaged in a global vision of architecture and sustainability, he draws from his experiences in China, Mexico, and Niger, where he developed, alongside the Akaras Association, a method of earthen construction that uses no wood. He began his career in world-renowned architecture firms, namely with an internship at Gerkan, Marg und Partners Architekten in Berlin. He was then an employee at David Chipperfield Architects in London, where he was part of the Concept Team in charge of international competitions.

His international collaboration, his dual specialization, and the multipolar foundation of his office (between Paris and Bordeaux) form a singular approach to a project in which production and creation, issues of urbanity and the challenges that society faces are put into dialogue with one another, while forming a calling at a larger scale.

His practice devotes its efforts largely to research and experimentation that are framed by a desire to find feasible responses to architectural problems.