Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

The Monolith

This is a project by ECDM architects + MVRDV + Erick Van Egeraat + Manuelle Gautrand + Pierre Gautier + West 8 and it is located at Lyon Confluence, Lyon, France. It was submitted to Architecture News Plus (ANP) by ECDM - Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec Architectes. Project's program: Housing, offices and commercial spaces. There are twenty four images for The Monolith.

: © Philippe Ruault

Project details

Project name: The Monolith
Location: Lyon Confluence, Lyon, France
Program: Housing, offices and commercial spaces
Area: Plot area: 8,530 m2 • Building footprint: 6,800 m2 • Total gross floor area: 35,060 m2 • Total gross floor area above grade: 28,500 m2 • Floor area: 9,000 m2
Year: Project year: 2005 • Completion: 2010
More details: Cost: 10.8 Million €
Client: ING Real Estate • Atemi
Project by: ECDM architects + MVRDV + Erick Van Egeraat + Manuelle Gautrand + Pierre Gautier + West 8
Others: Engineering: Kephren, Alto ingeneering, Peutz Acoustic, Van Santen

Project images

Designer's statement

The Monolith is born of a dialogue between a client ING and five European architects: MVRDV, Erick Van EGERAAT, Manuelle GAUTRAND, Pierre GAUTIER, ECDM (Emmanuel COMBAREL Dominique MARREC architects).

The result is "a 5 hands" architecture, which the value and wealth result from the combination of common rules to a variety of treatments. The Monolith, born of an intelligent and productive agreement, offers its users and inhabitants an inventive urbanity.

Inhabiting Lyon Confluence is, above all, living in the Lyon Centre with its services, its cultural landscape, its animation. Therefore, it’s the duty of our project to preserve the qualities and values of the historic city by redefining a new, contemporaneous lifestyle, guided by 2 strong and converging aspirations: a modern environment and a healthy quality of life, taking into account the requirements for the implementation of sustainable development. Naturally, the purpose is to tend to a more complex city, in a "Tetris attitude" considering combination, to put up scenarios for improbable events, to propose, without mimicry or formal posture, a sedimentation characteristic of the ancient city centers.

The approach is programmatic; the building shelters, contains, adds all together: shops, disabled residence, residential hotel, residential housing, social housing, and office.

The project is slice of urbanity, social realism, transversal proposal for diversity; a synthetic and ambiguous architecture with a common denominator: same quality of facades for all the included programs, the same envelope without any hierarchy or social expressionism , a picture showing a cautious neutrality towards any functional determinism. Maybe some day, same as the traditional workshops in Lyon, the housing will turn into offices and vice versa.

Our building is an element of sedimentation, embedded in a complex and rigorous urban composition. The purpose is the inclusion of a building in an urban landscape, a work to the service of the lot, in direct intersection with the surrounding buildings.

Our project precisely fits into the templates, alignments, frames, the values that govern the whole of the lot. So the plot consists of 2 parallel constructions, which optimize the characteristics and constraints of the site in terms of view, sunlight and animation disturbances.