Object lesson - Alfortville Lycee, France

Architectural Review, The, July, 1999 by Ben Azulay

A big new lycee built in a banlieue lying either side of the Seine, south-east of Paris, has been conceived as a fragment of city. The sense of urban responsibility implied by its design reproaches the amorphous sprawl that surrounds it.

Alfortville to the south-east of Paris in the lie de France is one of those unlovely conglomerations that constitute so much of the Parisian banlieues. Like others of these modern suburbs it is a desolate place without logic or centre, facing an industrial sprawl on the other side of the Seine.

On winning the commission to design a large secondary school in Alfortville, the Lycee Maximilian Perret, Massimiliano Fuksas seized the opportunity to create a piece of city with its own urban vocabulary and architectural dynamic.

The grand architectural gesture is a peculiarly French tradition, and in working in France, Fuksas, who is Italian, has shown himself an able exponent of it. But Alfortville - and the earlier Maison des Arts at Michel de Montaigne university at Bordeaux (AR February 1998) - suggest sharpening urban sensitivities. But if at Alfortville the monumental is not so apparent, other characteristics of the practice's work - the complex layering and material collaging - appear more pronounced.

In the past, Fuksas' predilection for structural fragmentation and strange eruptions has been allied with a fascination with the expressive qualities of materials (particularly metal). The combination has produced buildings with a powerful, almost geological, impact - the zinc-clad undulations of the Paris sports centre (AR August 1994), the surreal concoction in rusted steel which forms the entrance to the Niaux caves (AR August 1995), and the oxidized copper prism of the Maison des Arts, 'crouching among neo-Corbusian mediocrity' at Bordeaux (AR February 1998).

The Alfortville Lycee accommodates 1600 students, numerous departments and multifarious teaching rooms and workshops. Education at the college places strong emphasis on technology, and Fuksas' tough industrial vocabulary, couched in concrete, zinc, glass and brick, reflects this.

Set between streets of houses on one side and drab towers on the other, oriented towards the south and with the Seine on its western flank, the complex stretches horizontally to the edges of the irregular 1452[m.sup.2] site. Ingeniously, given the site's restrictions, Fuksas has yet managed to provide open space by installing an immense platform 7m high over the ground floor. This has the effect of creating two universes, one above and one beneath. Cut and slashed at various points to allow changing light into the courtyard, patio and streets below, the platform also provides open spaces at the upper level.

The north-east corner is the nodal - and expressionist - point of the scheme. Here the elevated library (encased in red-coated zinc), the ovoid auditorium (with a pleated skin of ribbed zinc), the director's offices and displaced volume of the caretaker's house are clustered around the main entrance and atrium. This is the hinge from which the various departments depend. Professional, general and post-graduate are housed in separate but contiguous buildings that are arranged around the western, northern and eastern peripheries of the site. Another block housing an apprentices' centre runs north-south along the inside of the post-graduate building.

Superimposed on this ordering is another, for the horizontal slab separates extrovert from more introverted spaces. Beneath the slab, the large restaurant on the south, and the lofty industrial workshops and technology studios advertise their presence with big windows onto the street. Above it, the tiers of teaching rooms and offices yield smaller, more intimate spaces as you move upwards.

Fuksas' fragment of city is a nervy restless landscape in which there is nothing symmetrical and everything is calculated to promote the dynamic. Irregular indentations of the site, to which the architecture conforms, with the horizontal layering, leave the impression of geological strata haphazardly exposed; and the haphazard is further suggested by a restless circulation system of bridges, stairs, ramps, streets and alleyways. Splashes of a single brilliant colour in this largely mineral universe of silver, black and grey, are shocking, particularly around the entrance where the blood-red library hovers above the structurally expressive post-graduate block. The displaced volume, like an outcrop, seems to be something of a Fuksas signature. On the north corner, the caretaker is housed in a zinc-clad box that recalls the campus radio station at the Maison des Arts. Supported on silvery stilts it is elevated above the director's offices. At the southern end of the site, housing for teachers has been conceived as a pile of overlapping blocks, yielding houses with private terraces and gardens.

Inevitably, given the scale of the Lycee, the daily wear and tear, and probably the maintenance budget, the open spaces are less inviting in places than was no doubt intended. But this urban fragment is elegantly contrived. The horizontal character, mediating between the domestic on one side and modern towers on the other, reduces the impact of what is a very large scheme. On all sides there is a real attempt to address the existing town - on the north, for example, where the general education block looks onto red-tiled roofs of town houses, metal and concrete gives way to brick. If continued and taken further, Fuksas' picturesque subvertion of Modernist planning should be interesting.