Evoking the Silhouette of Classic Glasshouses, La Biosphère Makes a Bold Architectural Statement in Versailles

La Biosphere — Photo © Hervé Abbadie

La Biosphère, Versailles, France.

Architects & Firms

“This is a small building trying to be a big building trying to be discreet,” jokes Carl Fredrik Svenstedt, founder and principal of the namesake Paris-based architecture office (CFSA). Baptized “La Biosphère,” the project in question forms part of a recently redeveloped neighborhood in Versailles, located at the far end of one of the three long avenues leading up to Louis XIV’s chateau. In a heterogeneous context where new meets old and scales vary greatly, CFSA faced the challenge of an awkward site and an uncertain program. Turning difficulty to its advantage, the office produced a visually striking building that elevates the architectural quality of the neighborhood.

Photo © Hervé Abbadie

A stone’s throw from Versailles Chantiers railroad station, the long and narrow island plot measures approximately 155 by 45 feet. Facing one- and two-story 1930s school buildings to the northwest, it is dominated by the six-story bulk of a new office complex to the southeast. Though attempts to preserve and integrate an existing building on the site would ultimately prove fruitless, the project did inherit its tenant, a branch of the gym franchise Basic-Fit. In a three-way conversation between the developer, the architect, and the planning authority, a program emerged that would include a ground-floor restaurant and a top-floor greenhouse, the latter inspired, among others, by Louis XIV’s celebrated orangery and by the next-door Jardin des Étangs Gobert, a small public park that once contained reservoirs for the Sun King’s fountains. In the end, the imagined tenants never materialized, and rather more prosaic activities colonized the entirety of La Biosphère: Basic-Fit rents levels two and three, while German supermarket chain Lidl occupies the ground floor and the basement.

The building houses an outpost of gym franchise Basic-Fit (1) and a Lidl supermarket (2). Photos © Hervé Abbadie

Rising 60 feet at its center, the building is anything but the banal box its site perimeter might have engendered. For a start, its top floor has an arched profile that mimics the classic glasshouse silhouette of buildings such as the Crystal Palace or Barcelona’s Umbracle. Moreover, in order to reduce its visual impact in the townscape, CFSA whittled away La Biosphère’s bulk in both plan and elevation. While its roofline descends to 40 feet at each end, its long southeastern flank curves inwards at each extremity, with end facades that are 5 feet narrower than the plot width. Stiffened by a concrete stair-and-elevator core on its straight, northwestern side, the building features a pine glulam frame, a solution that, in addition to its renewable credentials, made for simplified construction, the timber being easily bent as required. Where the generous glazing was concerned, the sinuosity turned out to be more challenging: while curved glass ensures a smooth profile on the top floor, panes that inflect in two directions proved too expensive when constructing the southeastern elevation, so a system of incremental step backs achieves the width reduction instead. Intended to eliminate the need for cooling through natural ventilation, the building is currently fitted with standard air conditioning, as installed by the tenants.

Covered all over, except on its end elevations, with horizontal timber slats for sun-screening, La Biosphère is still very transparent, an impression heighted by sophisticated sleights of hand such as the full roof glazing at either extremity (the rest of the roof is opaque) and the cantilevered concrete beams that hold up the floor plates at either end. Thanks to the subtle modeling of its mass, the edifice slips deftly into its context without ever appearing to impose. A friendly ark by day, La Biosphère glows seductively from within at night, and brings a welcome touch of class to the mundane but essential activities that are exercising and grocery shopping.

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