KOSMO - Parfums Christian Dior HQ - Refurbishment | Ateliers 2/3/4/

Charly Broyez

Kosmo - Parfums Christian Dior HQ - Refurbishment

• Architects + Landscape designer

The restructuring of the building at 192 av. Charles de Gaulle in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on a site of exceptional quality along the historic axis of Paris, facing the Seine and la Défense, goes beyond a simple facelift. What was to rise in this place, was an exceptional, “iconic” building, a radical one that makes sense.

photo_credit Charly Broyez — Charly Broyez

The transformation had to be morphological in order to make the original building into one that conforms to the present day.The vision was to convert this monolithic, introverted, opaque, unassuming building, into a permeable one, the support for a world of terraces/gardens and in which the workspaces offer a quality of life similar to that of a campus.

The two operations are dictated by the following motto:
LESS = MORE
- Less thickness for more light
- Less opacity for more transparency, more views
- Less repetition for more diversity
The first transformation was to hollow out the low building on the City side. A passage on the ground floor makes the heart of the block accessible, renders the accesses clearer, and contains a series of patios which illuminate the common areas of the first basement.

The second operation is the horizontal fragmentation of the upper (high-rise) building, on the Seine side. The building is subdivided volumetrically; large terraces emerge, the building is made more human, the corbels necessary for the sliding effects enlarge the floors, and the former panels beneath the windows have been removed to increase the field of vision from the offices overlooking the Seine and give the feeling of a bigger space than is actually the case.