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Manuelle Gautrand uses architectural sleight of hand to make a showroom wedged into an urban slit sparkle like a diamond.
From its famous rounded 2CV to its sloping, sculpted, and a bit buglike DS, French car manufacturer Citroën has always put emphasis on unique design. Its 1932 showroom on Paris’s Champs Elysées, a minimal structure with an Art Deco curtain-wall facade, considered revolutionary at the time, was a symbol of the company’s passion for nonconformity. Unfortunately, the form had become dated, and the effect of its soaring facade and pristine openness had been diminished in the 1980s by the addition of a second-floor restaurant. The company, seeking to offer its aesthetic fervor to a new generation, held a competition in 2002 to reimagine the space, which emerging Paris architect Manuelle Gautrand won.
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The new space, named C42 (the building number is 42, and the C stands for Citroën) opened last fall. It is adventurous, both stylistically and technically, for any site, but especially for the venerable Champs Elysées, located in the heart of Paris’s posh Right Bank. While the thoroughfare is known for boisterous crowds and packed stores and restaurants, its Haussmannian street wall has been little changed since the 19th century.
In its brief, Citroën asked the architect to reopen the space and once again make it a symbol of the company’s design achievements. The original showroom was only three stories and didn’t reach the roofline of the adjacent buildings. “First, we had to demolish the envelope of the existing building and then fill in a completely new structure,” Gautrand explains. The program called for restoring the same number of square feet the original Citroën showroom had, which meant increasing the height to seven stories, matching the heights of the adjacent buildings.
Gautrand made every aspect of the 98-foot-high, 12,900-square-foot space revolve around the dramatic display of the company’s cars. The intricate facade, she points out, is simply a giant window for their display. Numbers underscore the effect: The frontage extends only 40 feet, but there is 7,000 square feet of glazing.
Formal name of building: Citroën C42
Location: Paris, France
Size: 12,900 square feet
Cost: $17 million
Completion date: February 2007
Architect: Manuelle Gautrand Architects
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