White heat

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1994 by Catherine Slessor

The French broadcasting company Canal is Europe's largest pay-television channel, with a strong film-oriented output. Like Channel 4 (p35), its commercial success led to the construction of a new headquarters with a brief that combined technical facilities for the production of television programmes with offices for the channel's administration and management. Like Channel 4, this was the subject of an architectural competition, with a similar subtext concerned with the recolonisation of a run-down piece of inner city. But unlike Channel 4, the challenges presented by the Canal site were more complex and demanding than those of genteely decaying Pimlico.

Located on the left bank near the Pont Mirabeau (extolled so exquisitely by Apollinaire in his poem of 1912), the riverfront site lies just downstream from the Eiffel Tower. The indigenous working-class character of the area, which was originally populated by factories, freight depots and gasworks, has been eroded as the industrial fabric gradually crumbled. Only the name Quai Andre Citroen, after eponymous Parisian motor car tycoon, still exists to evoke vestigial, bygone glories. Although the site occupies an entire city block, only an L-shaped portion could actually be built on, because of the presence of an underground telephone exchange. That a site with such a bizarrely restrictive configuration should be selected, is an instructive measure of the zealous civic urge to reconquer Paris's moribund industrial landscape. But the new building also forms part of an emergent media quarter in this western periphery of the city. Film studios have long been established in the nearby Boulogne-Billancourt, but it was not until the construction of the Maison de la Radio during the 1 970s, that the potential f or the transformation of the area into a centre for audio-visual production became apparent. Some city planners have even suggested that it may eventually parallel London's now dismembered Fleet Street in terms of identity and significance. Yet not all the buildings in this putative quartierare equally successful, as demonstrated by the oppressive behemoth housing the former state-run television channel TF1 on the opposite side of the Seine. By contrast Meier's great white building is altogether more dignified, and deals with its physical contingencies more skilfully.

The general organisation is derived from the imposed site constraints. On the west side facing the Seine is a thin, wedge-shaped administration wing; on the east side a wider block housing audio-visual production facilities. The delicately tapering plan of the off ice block is a response to the north-east and north-west boundaries of the L-shaped site, which define two adjacent sides of a square park. This new green sauce, built on top of the subterranean telephone exchange, occupies the greater part of the block. In effect the new building is extruded around the, central void, while systematically exploring the contrasting texture of the riverfront and adjacent streets. The rigidly orthogonal riverside elevation terminates in a dynamic curving volume housing a wedge of open-plan offices. The seductive plasticity invariably recalls Jean Nouvel's Arab World Institute, (AR November 1989) but Meier's building is more complex and fragmented despite the weekly homogenising white carapace. This fragmentation articulates and emphasises the differences between the various elements of the programme, between the repetitive and the singular.

There are also moments of gestural bravado -the riverfront elevation is terminated at the south end by a giant sculptural screen that mediates between the low-level offices and the increased height of the rest of the building. From the opposite bank of the Seine, the screen appears as a colossal window or proscenium (or indeed television) framing the sky and city beyond; this device has subsequently been abstracted to become the symbol of Canal .

The blind boxes of the three recording studios are housed in the squat street block perpendicular to the river, edged with a string of small production rooms on the courtyard side. A soaring, oversailing roof shaped like an aeroplane wing unifies this cellular block and contains and conceals assorted services systems. A horseshoe-shaped film theatre sits on top of the recording studios and is extruded upwards into a dramatically top-lit conical volume. Entry to the building is under a suspended, ceremonial canopy into a luminous atrium that acts as a visual connection between the street and the garden courtyard beyond. A slightly incongruous trio of freestanding television screens, perpetually tuned to Canal , are the only suggestion of institutionalised narcissism, apart from the conspicuous tackle of satellite hardware on the roof. The bright Parisian light infuses the working spaces with a subtle, diffused quality and, at a higher level, boardrooms and meeting areas have marvellous framed views over the city and the river.

Although Canal is a muscular, corporate monument, it has succeeded in appropriating a certain toughness and inscrutability from its surroundings. More particularly, in the same way that the factories and car plants of previous generations were such undeniably potent expressions of human industry, so the current crop of media related buildings are perhaps the clearest embodiment of an emerging workplace zeitgeist for the late twentieth century.