MVRDV has shared details on its just-completed Gaîté Montparnasse block renovation in the French capital.

The project transformed Pierre Dufau’s once iconic 1974 Ilôt Vandamme design into a more welcoming mixed-use site just south of the Tour Montparnasse facing Avenue du Maine.

“This piece of the city was like an island of ‘70s nostalgia — a tower with no visible entrance, and a plinth where you could get lost between the pedestrian slabs and automobile boulevards,” MVRDV founder Winy Maas explained. “The first step in the design was a study to fragment the block and to make sustainable density — adding new programs such as homes and revealing hidden ones like the library. It created a kind of explosion of buildings that combines large and small scale, existing and new programs, where everything mixes and opens up to the city with lobbies and windows of varying scales like so many addresses.”

By splitting the massing using a tonal glazed cladding scheme and added exterior elements such as setbacks, small balconies, and overhangs, the redesigned structure came more into agreement with the scale and visual character of its surrounds while using as much of its existing plinth as possible. The further installation of large windows provides pedestrians with a clearer view of the reimagined slate of activities taking place inside.

Programmatically, MVRDV added density to the site through the incorporation of a new timber social housing block and kindergarten, while depositing the previously three-story office block into one seven-story tower and moving an existing subterranean library into a two-story above-ground space next to the Hotel Pullman.

“The process of transforming an urban block on such a large scale becomes ever more precise, and yet is never finished,” Maas said of the inherited complexities of the block's design. “To know which piece of concrete to keep and which to cut, how to occupy, redevelop, then reoccupy spaces, is a continuous conversation. The conclusion of the current transformation process is a milestone in the history of this urban block, to be sure, but it will continue as a DIY process in permanent evolution. This great project is not finished; it must  continue.”