French architect and landscape designer Edouard Francois was encharged of the renovation and facade design of the Fouquet's Barriere Hotel in Paris, which is located in one block facing Avenue des Champs Elysees. The architect mission was the general plan of the whole hotel, including courtyards, administration offices and a spa service, spread on different plots of the "golden triangle", and the design of new facades for extensions.
The surrounding area is the most elegant and expensive of the whole metropolis, and very significant in terms of architecture and relation with the context.
COPY - EDIT
The project key-word and practical operation is "COPY - EDIT". Through this operation, the building declares its belonging to the 21st century keeping strong connection with the Haussmann epoque, as a bridge between two centuries. The new facade stands on the corner of the back street, and it is showing off also in different points of the block.
The decision to reproduce the typical Haussmann facade which stands on Champs Elysees, with his characteristic windows, basement, roof and decorations, in grey concrete panels, is more significant than a simple imitation: it's a re-interpretation of the "old" through nowadays industrial technology. The dimensions of the concrete panels are not the same as the typical stone blocks of Paris, but the composition of tones of grey remind them clearly. Beside the accuracy of the reproducing work, at first sight the facade seems to belong to that Hausmann epoque.
At the same time, the opening of clean windows, rectangular, horizontally orientated and sharply framed, together with the closure of the "old" windows, makes clear that the facade has been softly and firmly modified by a new force. As the interior distribution does not correspond anymore to the facade levels, the new window boxes are just shown off on their proper position.
The new windows, sticking out randomly on the elevations, can be considered as the aggression of the "old" facade by the contemporary intervention, as transition from the renovated interior towards the outside.
Furthermore, new relevance is given to the old Haussmann facade, by the moment it has been re-built: new architecture seems to need a basis coming from the past as a support to propose its presence, even though that one is clearly fake. The value of this project consists in the originality of the basic operation, which opens to multiple interpretations about the relation of contemporary architecture with the past heritage.
