France remains very special in that it still believes in grands projets,” commented OMA partner Ellen van Loon at the unveiling of the Rotterdam office’s latest French opus, the 645,000-square-foot “Lab City.” The grand projet she was referring to is the 30-square-mile Saclay Campus, an industrial and higher-education “cluster” 12 miles southwest of Paris, to which the French government has committed nearly $6 billion to turn it into a world-class research-and-development hub. Currently a giant building site, Paris-Saclay will group together institutions that have long been located there—including the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, the École supérieure d’optique, and the École Polytechnique—alongside new education-sector arrivals that are being encouraged to relocate. On the industry side, many companies have been attracted to Saclay over the years—Renault, for example, who built their Technocentre there in 1998—and newcomers are likewise being encouraged, such as energy giant EDF which last year opened a research center at Saclay (by architect Francis Soler). Within a decade, the campus will be connected to central Paris by a new metro line, and more than 18 million square feet of new building will have been added to the existing fabric.