“I very much wanted the memory of industrial use to remain,” says Dominique Perrault about his transformation of Paris’s imposing central post office, a 344,500-square-foot mastodon built by Julien Guadet in 1878–88, which occupies an entire city block in the heart of the French capital. Now completed in its raw state, and set to open early next year once its occupants have moved in, the reconfigured complex will contain shops, offices, cafés, a hotel, a child-daycare center, a police station, social housing, a parcel-delivery platform and a postal bureau. “I was determined to avoid anything that smacked of the corporate,” continues Perrault, who won the 2011–12 design competition. “What we’ve done here has absolutely nothing generic about it—the whole thing is entirely individual.”
As professor of theory at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, Guadet was extremely influential, his pupils including Tony Garnier and Auguste Perret. An advocate of Rational Classicism, with its emphasis on construction, he championed an “elementarist” approach to design in which typified architectural forms were logically combined in axial compositions. His one major building, the Poste du Louvre demonstrates his precepts, with its central courtyard and cast-iron structure—used to achieve the wide spans needed for the now defunct sorting offices and garages for 100 horse-drawn vehicles—and its structurally independent ashlar curtain wall, which presents a face of sober solidity to the world at large. “The conversion was first and foremost a question of urbanism,” says Perrault. “How do you open up this city block, which was like a fortress really, to the surrounding neighborhood?”
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