Who bit the orange cube?
Dominique Jakob and Brendan Macfarlane are Paris-based architects who designed the appropriately named Orange Cube in Lyon, France. The building is part of the larger “Confluences” urban planning project to revitalize Lyon’s waterfront.
Surprisingly enough, it is not a museum, but an office building.
The building, however out of this world it may seem, is actually quite rational in its design process: which makes it all the more remarkable, when you notice how inventive it looks like. Designed as a simple cube, it literally conforms to its zoning boundaries in plan, only to be carved and pierced in section and elevation, allowing natural daylight into the heart of the building. The light-well, which would have been necessary anyway, is ingeniously tilted and extruded to face the river and direct views towards the water. In addition to this, it helps ventilation enter the building.
The lightweight façade is filled with random openings and is finished off with a second canopy, which is punctured with pixilated patterns that are supposed to recall the flow of the river. This outer shell, though plain yet perforated at first sight, is in fact void for over 60% of its surface.
“We were very aware of changing an area that was a depressed kind of no-man’s-land and giving it a new energy”
[ MacFarlane ]
To create the three large voids which deform the cube, the architects worked with a series of volumetric perturbations. As a matter of fact, they subtracted from the cube three conic volumes, inclined along three different axes: the angle of the façade, the roof and the access level. These distortions generate spaces, openings and build a relationship between the building, its users and the context.
For instance, the first volumetric perturbation is based on the visual relationship with the arched structure of the hall; this allows to connect the two buildings and to create a new double height entry lobby.
Similarly the opening on the top brings natural light within the cube’s volume and merges with the large void in the façade, only to completely alter the spaces inside and to free dynamic and otherwise impossible views.
Yet, it’s not only the voracious bites in the façade that make the “Cube Orange” a landmark in this industrial area dominated by warehouses. As it turns out its color does half the job: even from behind, when it’s still just a cube, this remarkable building can’t be overlooked.
The color orange was chosen in reference to a special lead paint which is typically used in harbor areas, thanks to its superior resistance.
On the top floors, an increasingly large setback of the façade frees up an open air common space which still enjoys some privacy behind the screening outer shell, and offers an unrestricted view of the sky, the river and the whole Confluences area.
Within the broad redevelopment of Lyon Confluences, Jacob and Macfarlane’s Cube Orange was among the first buildings to be completed, becoming a catalyst for further development and bringing new life to these forgotten river docks.
As per schedule, it is now in the very good company of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’s Musée des Confluences, the regional institution’s HQ by Christian de Porzamparc – the Hotel Region Rhone-Alpes – and several other high profile projects, which firmly establish Confluences on the architectural radar.
Photos by Roland Halbe and Nicolas Borel.
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