Located near Pantin Town Hall, PAN-H transforms a 1950s building through a careful process of selective demolition, reconstruction, and rehabilitation. Rather than clearing the site entirely, the project works from the value of the existing structure, using what can be retained as the basis for a new hotel organised around light, vegetation, and spatial openness. In this sense, sustainability is approached not as an applied layer of technical systems, but as a design methodology rooted in reuse, reduction, and the reactivation of underused urban land.
The project’s central gesture is the reintroduction of a ground-level garden on a plot that had previously been fully built over. This shift is both environmental and spatial. It replaces sealed ground with a planted surface, restores permeability and visual depth to the site, and creates a new relationship between the hotel and the city. The result is a hospitality project that seeks to soften density rather than intensify it.
Reuse as a framework for transformation
A defining sustainability measure in PAN-H is the decision to preserve 40 per cent of the existing building. This retained fabric carries both material and cultural value. The concrete structure, rather than being treated as obsolete, is understood as a resource: it embodies prior material investment, reduces the need for complete reconstruction, and preserves traces of the site’s industrial heritage. By building from what already exists, the project lowers the environmental cost typically associated with demolition and replacement.
Selective demolition allows the structure to be reworked without erasing its history. The retained wings are reconnected through a new urban frontage, opening the site visually and spatially. This approach creates greater porosity at ground level and allows the project to mediate between the scale of the street and the quieter interior landscape. The hotel thus emerges through subtraction and adaptation as much as through new construction.
Wood, concrete, and a moderated urban presence
The material strategy is deliberately limited. Wood becomes the guiding material of the intervention, introduced to temper the harder, more mineral presence of the retained concrete. This contrast is important environmentally as well as architecturally. By pairing an existing heavy structure with a warmer, lighter material expression, the project reduces the need for entirely new structural systems while reshaping the atmosphere of the building.
On the façade, this material dialogue is expressed through a wood-and-concrete vertical rhythm that captures light and reveals the depth of the relief. The façade does not operate merely as an image; it helps articulate solar exposure, shadow, and thickness, making the building’s envelope more responsive and legible. Wood also plays a social role by softening the urban scale and establishing a more welcoming, hospitable identity for the hotel.
Reintroducing vegetation and urban porosity
The reinstated garden at ground level is one of the project’s most significant environmental contributions. On a site that had previously been fully occupied by building mass, the return of vegetation improves the microclimate, introduces shade and evapotranspirative cooling, and creates a more breathable condition within the urban block. It also changes how the project is perceived and used, offering visual openings that invite the city inward.
This planted landscape continues upward into the idea of a suspended garden at the heart of the block, where wood, vegetation, and light shape the hotel experience. Rather than treating planting as decorative, the project uses it to restructure the relationship between built form and open space. The hotel is therefore organised not only around rooms and circulation, but around environmental qualities that support comfort and calm.
