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RATP Bus Centre in Thiais

This is a project by ECDM - Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec Architectes and it is located at Thiais, France. Project's program: Administrative building. There are nineteen images for RATP Bus Centre in Thiais.

: © ECDM - Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec Architectes

Project details

Project name: RATP Bus Centre in Thiais
Location: Thiais, France
Program: Administrative building
Area: Site Area: 3.5 Ha • Built-up Area: 2.200 m2
Year: Completion; 2007
More details: Cost: 3.9 Million €
Client: RATP
Project by: ECDM - Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec Architectes
Others: Project Manager: Aliette Chauchat • Engineering: BETOM • Quantity Surveyor and Cost Control: ECDM • Main Contractors: DUTHEIL-BETSINOR (prefab-concrete), LABASTERE (aluminium windows, metalwork)

Project images

Designer's statement

The RATP wished to realize a new building intended for the bus drivers and the administrative staff of the existing center. Located in Thiais, it controls all the bus lines of the south and the east of Paris City. It’s an industrial context, characterised by a succession of boxes, at best basic.

The building concentrates lots of specificities and lots of representatives. The centre accommodates 300 buses. 800 bus drivers forward trough the building every day, plus the administrative staffs which manages the centre. It’s a flux building. The plan has been in evolution during all the studies, the work and is still “moving”, so there is no predetermined structural or functional screen on the building. Aside the administrative building, the program included the realization of a new checkpoint of the centre and a bikes shelter.

We reduced the site to a bus park, a vast monolithic concrete slab, uniformed territory composed of one sole material. The building starts with the deformation of the ground, the distortion of the existing concrete slab, and continues it with an apparently similar material Ductal®, still concrete but a dazzling sheet of concrete, which responds to very sophisticated demands: informality of the structure, constant evolution of the plans, dematerialization, precision, density, homogeneity of aspect according to the mould designed. It ensures a continuity of the ground from the road, to the skin of the façades, the suspended ceilings and the terrace rooftop without any rupture. Combined with the structural qualities of the material, the building has neither a beginning nor an end. It is a continuity of a surface of which we can, depending on what you aim at, not control the limits. It is an inflection of a slab which spreads on the whole site. The building appears like a monolith with rounded edges, polished somehow. Characterized by a dense square plan (35m x 35m) developed on 2 levels, it presents itself as a dense building, inert, deaf, and enigmatic as “the hull of a Russian submarine in the waters of Murmansk”.

The texture games are facilitated by the flexibility of the material and its ability to be molded with precision. The quality of finish and rigor of Ductal® contribute to ensuring this concrete skin, accurate, continuous, perfect connections. The skin: 3 cm thick displays a single texture of dots in relief like a game of "LEGO".

The “windows” are cut with a cutter blade: surgical incisions generating volumes in negative which reveal colored mirrors under the thin crust of concrete. Treated with silver mirror dots, chromatics of the glass products are inspired by the tinted curtain wall frontages of the office buildings which border the main road.