In France, the 1980s saw the emergence of a form of disregard regarding commercial real estate. Indeed, the architectural manifestos, signatures of the power of the industries of the nineteenth century and until the middle of the twentieth century, gradually gave way to a homogenization of industrial and tertiary writing.
This field of architecture has become the business of space planners and programmers, dispossessing the leaders of a direct relationship with their architects. Actually, how to speak of urbanism when the materials used have a longevity of 30 to 40 years, and that depreciation is 7 years long.
The Sellsy’s head office occupies a wing of the old aquarium of La Rochelle, which was built on an artificial piece of land, reclaimed of the sea in the 80s. How to convert a neo-futuristic architecture, dedicated to a use in another use a priori very different ?
The project takes advantage from the star-shaped deployment of the former aquarium to organize the marketing, research & development, sales, management, restaurant and gym departments.
Three imperatives are required: acoustics, partitioning, and a domestic atmosphere.
The 250 m2 space is partitioned by steel and glass walls. Those partitions were made to measure, so as they can embrace the rhythm of the existing modular ceilings.
The luminaires are replaced by a system of ambient lighting provided by dimmable ceiling-recessed, with a yellow color (3000 K). It is about an invisible comfort, because it enable both to subvert the standardization of lighting which is often too violent in tertiary and also enable taking into account the acoustics. The loudness increases with lux. The acoustic effect sounds striking.
