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David Chipperfield Architects debut three-building La Confluence contribution in Lyon

2024-12-16T17:18:00-05:00

David Chipperfield Architects has just completed a three-building scheme for the larger La Confluence master plan in Lyon, France designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

View of the office building from one of the garden courtyards. Image: © Simon Menges

The program includes a small office building, housing block, and mixed-use tower. The firm tells us each is "shaped by their structure and defined by their simple rectilinear forms yet react to their specific location in different ways."

View of the social housing building from one of the garden courtyards. Image: © Simon Menges

All three mirror each other and the other buildings in the plan thanks to the choice of mineral-like materials to cover each of their facades. The three buildings combined offer a gross floor area equal to 30,000 square meters (appx. 323,000 square feet) and were designed especially to enhance their site's riverfront connection.

The mixed-use tower building. Image: © Simon Menges

Housing—or at least its possibility—b...

Jean Nouvel's new residential tower in Lyon, France: Love it or hate it?

2019-09-03T13:30:00-04:00

Along the banks of the Rhône and Saône rivers in Lyon stands an unmissable new tower designed by the famed architect Jean Nouvel. The 16-story building's pastel-colored facades and angular parapet present a stark contrast to the tower's more traditional industrial and residential apartment block neighbors.

The neighborhood of La Confluence is transforming into an area filled with contemporary architecture, quite a change from its history as a formerly industrial area. Amid this graying backdrop, the new residential tower, called Ycone, gently adds a tone of color and material richness.

Image © C. Morel Journel/Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Image © Guillaume Perret/Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Nouvel has shared with the media, “the result, seen from outside, will depend on the set of constraints that get revised, adjusted, and embellished, if possible, by the story that’s brought us here.”

Stephan Novakovic of Azure Magazine notes: "Compared to the drama of many of Nouvel’s recent projects–including ...

Dan Ohlmann creates impossibly detailed miniature interiors

2019-05-14T13:28:00-04:00

If you ever find yourself in Lyon, France, you'll want to make time for a visit to the Musée Miniature et Cinéma, one of the city's most peculiar museums. It is most notably for featuring Dan Ohlmann's impeccably detailed 1/10th and 1/12th scale models of architectural interiors.

The Brooklyn Collection Miniature, by Dan Ohlmann.

His models are so realistic, in fact, that the only way their illusions can be broken is by the addition of the artist's body, whether that's a hand adding or removing a piece of furniture, his head poking through to revel in the model's completion, or even his whole body, as he was able to achieve in his rendition of a natural history museum.

Maxims de Paris Miniature, by Dan Ohlmann.

His practice can be likened to that of Thomas Demand, a contemporary German artist that photographs intricate models of architectural spaces. The crucial difference is that while Demand destroys his models after photographing them, Ohlmann proudly displays his behind glass, a...

The NYT takes a closer look at Coop Himmelb(l)au's new Confluence Museum in Lyon

2014-12-22T13:24:00-05:00

This fall, the French cultural season opened with the private Vuitton Foundation museum in Paris, a rarefied environment for a select collection of contemporary art, by Frank Gehry. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, France’s second largest metropolitan area, Lyon — arguably Paris’s historic rival, the Chicago to New York — just inaugurated the equally large and prepossessing Confluence Museum (the Musée des Confluences).