“We thought of the vault as a skin,” says Jean-Marie Priol of Paris/New York–based lighting-design studio BOA, when describing their project for the headquarters of the Le Monde newspaper group. “A skin that translates emotion. You might blush, be cold, be afraid, get goose bumps . . .” Designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta and completed in 2020, the building sits on a concrete platform over railroad tracks next to the Paris-Austerlitz station, so is engineered as a bridge. Snøhetta chose to express this in the form of a giant arch, whose vast irregular vault soars above a public “media plaza” that accesses the building and will one day link with a planned pedestrian walkway behind the terminus. In their competition renderings, Snøhetta showed the vault studded with lights, and later sought BOA’s technical expertise to realize their vision.
“We’re usually approached at the beginning of the design process,” explains Priol, “but here we arrived after construction had begun and were given just three months to find a solution to a specific technical problem. We used that opportunity to augment the concept and make it more narrative and contextual.” On the technical side, it was a question of sourcing LED lamping that could be unscrewed like classic lightbulbs—the stone-colored concrete panels that clad the vault cannot be removed for maintenance—and offer the chromatic range that BOA was seeking. Time and budget precluded a custom solution, but Canadian manufacturer Lumenpulse had developed just the right product. On the conceptual side, BOA set themselves a threefold challenge: obtaining a satisfactory result from a reduced number of LEDs (1,312 for a surface area of close to 23,700 square feet, a figure arrived at through cost negotiations); wowing first-time visitors; and ensuring that regular users would not tire of the spectacle.
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