RATP Bus Centre in Thiais, France

August 02, 2010 Category: Commercial Building, Office

Located in Thiais, France, RATP Bus Centre was designed by ecdm architects. The building starts with the deformation of the ground, the distortion of the existing concrete slab, and continues it with an apparently similar material Ductal ®, still concrete but a dazzling sheet of concrete, which responds to very sophisticated demands: informality of the structure, constant evolution of the plans, dematerialization, precision, density, homogeneity of aspect according to the mould designed. It ensures a continuity of the ground from the road, to the skin of the façades, the suspended ceilings and the terrace rooftop without any rupture.
Combined with the structural qualities of the material, the building has neither a beginning nor an end. It is a continuity of a surface of which we can, depending on what you aim at, not control the limits. It is an inflection of a slab which spreads on the whole site.
The building appears like a monolith with rounded edges, polished somehow. Characterized by a dense square plan (35m x 35m) developed on 2 levels, it presents itself as the continuity of the banal coating of the roads, like a piece stamped from distorting the existing concrete surface of the Bus Center. The Ductal ® is used here as a morphing to cover the carcass of a composite program. The result is a dense building, inert, deaf, and enigmatic as “the hull of a Russian submarine in the waters of Murmansk”.
The concrete hull is cut out with a cutter putting at sharp, revealing cavities of reflective and coloured glass under the concrete crust. Treated with silver mirror dots, chromatics of the glass products are inspired by the tinted curtain wall frontages of the office buildings which border the main road.

RATP Bus Centre Design by ecdm architects