Dream's Hybrid Timber Building in the Paris Olympic Village

Four residential strips on the east bank of the Seine between the northern Paris suburbs of Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen – that is Dominique Perrault's masterplan for the Olympic Village for the 2024 Summer Games. On the second of these strips, known as Les Belvédères, the Dream architectural firm has now completed an eight-storey office building with a surface area of 15,000 m². It is unusual in two respects: its hybrid timber structure and the gymnasium that crowns the building like a large lantern.

Actually, there are three halls, each with a 3 x 3 basketball court. How fitting: Dimitri Roussel, the founder of Dream, was once a professional basketball player before deciding to become an architect. The 8-m-high halls are spanned by striking wooden trusses that, when illuminated at night, shine far into the night. The remaining upper floors are also based on a flexible (re)usable timber frame structure. This was specified in the master plan for all new buildings in the area. Prefabricated concrete slabs rest on the wooden beams. Only the ground floor, where space was created for a food court, was built as a reinforced concrete structure.

Except for the ground floor, the new building is a timber hybrid construction. The brick facade is a reminder of the site's industrial history. © Cyrille Weiner

The seven architectural firms that designed all 19 new buildings at Les Belvédères also agreed on the materials and colours of the facades. They opted for beiges, browns and reds, and a palette of metal, brick and terracotta that reflects the industrial history of the site. In Dream's new building, this resulted in a kind of two-storey collage of light brick facades, with the floors in between set off by darker metal cladding.