For this project, we paid particular attention to the context and the relationship that the event room and the modular room could ideally maintain with the foyer, the avenue Paul Vaillant Couturier and of course the garden set back overlooking the old quarries.

The historical heritage of the site in which the Palais des Fêtes is located has inspired us. We wanted to bring it, through the architectural volumes and the flexibility of the spaces, a form of modernity.

A PLACE OF HISTORY

The Polish Pavilion was born out of the 1937 World's Fair, giving birth to the indispensable relationship between Art and Technique. This idea of ​​linking the Beautiful and the Useful generates the creation of Pavilions with eclectic architectural styles, between industrial and Art Nouveau styles, which will be asserted during this event.

Today, the Palais des Fêtes is the fruit of this history because it was in 1938 that the mayor of Romainville, Pierre Kerautret, elected in 1935, bought the structure, which was being dismantled. Its metal frame, which originally formed part of the Halles du Pavilion, is a precious witness to the history of Romainville.

The mayor wanted to turn it into a gymnasium and the new building was the first institutional building to adorn Avenue Paul Vaillant Couturier. The framework was therefore flanked by two new buildings then the main facade dressed in an "art-deco" style corresponding to the canons of this period.

REVEALING WHAT WAS HIDDEN

Allowing Romainvillois and Romainvilloise to freely appropriate the building required a major overhaul, a work of excavation and articulation of spaces between them in relation to the garden and the avenue in particular.

Despite everything, the surface, so to speak the skin of the building, was a fundamental issue as the existing facade no longer communicated with Avenue Paul Vaillant Couturier. Because if formerly the volumes of the building had been designed to produce a solemn effect, the additions of new constructions as well as the modification of the accesses to the room had finished distorting it. Either way, it wasn't designed to be walked through.

To meet the challenges of opening up the project to the City, we have fundamentally changed the composition of the facade in order to improve its connectivity with its immediate environment.
Thus the facade plays the role of interface between the various environments to visually relate the foyer to the street, the street to the garden, the Hall to the House of Philosophy, etc.

Depending on the degree of permeability desired to stage the elements of the program, we have worked on various sets of opacities and transparencies with the aim of distinguishing the accesses of the public.

Likewise, a set of articulated portals giving onto the public garden complete this device in a dynamic way while animating the facade.

RECOMPOSE AND LINK

Once the facade has been crossed, the visitor enters either through the Foyer overlooking the event rooms and modular or through the Hall opening onto the House of Philosophy and the garden.

The iron and steel frame, made fully visible again, houses and articulates under one roof the various entities making up the renewed “Palais des Fêtes”, renamed “Le Pavillon”, on the occasion of its inauguration in memory of the old “Polish Pavilion” from the 1930s.

A contemporary object, the “Pavilion” offers volumes in close, almost symbiotic, relationship with its environment. It is an open place, which can be walked through, crossed, and which offers the visitor multiple perspectives on the city and the garden. The routes thus seem to multiply and crumple up as you walk.

The two performance halls and the facades are made up of large sections of metal cut out like the veins of a leaf, which fold and unfold, forming like a landscape in the landscape.

Shaped by perforated metal sheets following a plant pattern, certain walls play the role of filter and sun protection. The whole seems to recompose a spectacular landscape, the work's primary identity.