Romainville,Paris, France

Respectful to the Palais des Fêtes, an exhibition pavilion built for Paris World’s Fair “des Arts et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne,” Benedetta Tagliabue and her architecture studio Miralles Tagliabue EMBT in collaboration with the french studio Ilimelgo have created Le Pavillion de Romainville, an extended cultural center linked to a garden and a nearby forest.

Le Pavillion de Romainville has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Awards Honorable Mention by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

Enlisted by the City of Romainville after a won competition, Miralles Tagliabue EMBT was given the opportunity to transform and give new functions to the small pre-existing building that needed a new life.

New volumes have been added to the rehabilitated preexistence creating a complex that links the city.

The cultural center is one more example of how Benedetta Tagliabue’s studio materializes its projects: an organic gesture capable of connecting with the most sustainable aspects for urban integration and the insertion of green in the city, taking care of the environment and the memory of the place.

It is a space for coexistence for all audiences, open to different artistic expressions and practices, which strengthens the cultural fabric of Romainville.

The community identifies with this space for which it feels a special collective pride, now renewed with the synergies between green and culture in an open place of life, in the heart of the city.

This new cultural center joins the different interventions redefining the city of the future under the values of accessibility, respect for the environment, and the improvement of quality of life.

Taking care of what already exists, the project rehabilitates the structure of the Polish Pavilion for the Universal Exhibition of 1937, which formed the old Palais de Fêtes with a façade accessible from the street.

The history of the Pavilion is thus incorporated into the new set of pieces, maintaining its leading role as the city’s cultural heritage and dialoguing with the new faceted volumes.

The sensitivity of the project strategy consists in creating new volumes organically connected with the old pieces, the new garden, and the city.

The care for the memory of the place determines the fit of the project, which is resolved with an accompaniment to the citizen: from the city to the garden and to the forest.

With the designed garden, the green arrives at the city through the entrance hall that serves as a link at the street level.

The street façade has been treated as a fundamental interface to allow this permeability with the urban environment.

A game of opacities and transparencies in the apertures invites you to enter.

The hall is both a meeting place and an articulation with the built volumes.

On a larger urban scale, the new pieces that make up Le Pavillon connect with the landscape of the old quarries of the city and are located on the link between the periphery and the center of Paris.

Integration in the heart of the city, culture at the street level If the project on an urban scale attends and takes care of the connections with the environment and the city of Paris, on a small scale it prioritizes the user experience.

Le Pavillon program is solved with the design of different pieces that allow multiplying the scenic and activity possibilities.

The spatial organization favors a continuous and simultaneous use of its spaces: entrance and connection hall, event room, and modular room.

In addition, the center houses La Maison de la filo, a unique space in France that promotes resources for the dissemination of philosophical thought and practices.

Le Pavillon is a highly sustainable project both for the idea of reusing pre-existing pieces in a careful way and for its integration into the environment creating new green spaces and the use of the materials produced in it.

The two new volumes built have a double skin as a façade: exposed concrete and metallic layer with green shadows that remind us of the proximity of the forest.

The play of colors on the façade is integrated into the garden landscape and dialogues with the pre-existing pieces.

The façade responds to a sustainable choice linked to the nature of Romainville in which the industry has had a transcendent historical and social role.

Project: Le Pavillion de Romainville
Architects: Miralles Tagliabue EMBT
Lead Architect: Benedetta Tagliabue
Associate Architects: Ilimelgo Paris
General Contractor: Eiffage Construction Equipements
Client: City of Romainville
Photographers: Duccio Malagamba