Log inSubscribe
DETAIL

Basketball hall with a view

Dream's Hybrid Timber Building in the Paris Olympic Village

 - Jakob Schoof

Dream's new building in the Olympic Village in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris, combines seven floors of offices with a sports hall on the top floor. Like most of the new buildings in the area, it was built using a hybrid timber construction method.

Dream's Hybrid Timber Building in the Paris Olympic Village
© Cyrille Weiner

Four residential strips on the east bank of the Seine between the northern Paris suburbs of Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen – that is Dominique Perrault's masterplan for the Olympic Village for the 2024 Summer Games. On the second of these strips, known as Les Belvédères, the Dream architectural firm has now completed an eight-storey office building with a surface area of 15,000 m². It is unusual in two respects: its hybrid timber structure and the gymnasium that crowns the building like a large lantern.

36-metre-high hybrid timber building

Actually, there are three halls, each with a 3 x 3 basketball court. How fitting: Dimitri Roussel, the founder of Dream, was once a professional basketball player before deciding to become an architect. The 8-m-high halls are spanned by striking wooden trusses that, when illuminated at night, shine far into the night. The remaining upper floors are also based on a flexible (re)usable timber frame structure. This was specified in the master plan for all new buildings in the area. Prefabricated concrete slabs rest on the wooden beams. Only the ground floor, where space was created for a food court, was built as a reinforced concrete structure.

© Cyrille Weiner

Brick and metal facades

The seven architectural firms that designed all 19 new buildings at Les Belvédères also agreed on the materials and colours of the facades. They opted for beiges, browns and reds, and a palette of metal, brick and terracotta that reflects the industrial history of the site. In Dream's new building, this resulted in a kind of two-storey collage of light brick facades, with the floors in between set off by darker metal cladding.

Architecture: DREAM
Clients: Nexity, Eiffage immobilier
Location: Saint-Ouen (FR)

Timber construction: Simonin Wood Solutions
Landscape architecture: Atelier Georges
Building services engineering: Setec

Gallery

  • The new seven-storey building on Hohlstrasse in Zurich will comprise a ground floor with retail space and public service areas, and five upper floors with commercial space.

    Railway Tracks as a Supporting Structure - How Does That Work? 

    Around 180 kilometres of track are replaced every year on the Swiss rail network. Until now, all this scrap metal has been melted down. However, the first building with a steel framework made from recycled rails will soon be constructed in western Zurich.

  • Landscape architect Line Ramstad is the new chief curator of the Oslo Triennale.

    „One Size Does Not Fit All" 

    Facades made from waste wool, recycled steel from decommissioned ships, housing rather than investment property: Line Ramstad, chief curator of the Oslo Triennale, shows what happens when nature takes precedence.

  • Paul Van Ostaijen Culture Campus in Leuven

    Lava architecten transformed an old mission building in Leuven into a place where circus arts, music, theatre, and dance coexist under one shared roof. Effective soundproofing is the precondition for the shared use of the facility.

  • Even though the main exhibition pavilion in the Giardini was closed, the 2025 Architecture Biennale featured more exhibits than ever before.

    Self-Exploitation in the Celebrity Circus

    At every Architecture Biennale, the curators face the same obstacles: a lack of funding, a great deal of red tape, and an organisation that ignores collective achievements. Why do they put themselves through this? We speak to Albena Yaneva, who spent a year observing the development process of the 2025 Biennale.

  • A vision for the future of Barcelona: Boltshauser Architekten have designed demountable street furniture made from concrete blocks for the Catalan metropolis. The blocks are made from recycled lean-mix concrete layers under roads.

    An End to Downcycling  

    In its current form, concrete recycling does little to help climate protection. The CO₂-intensive cement is lost irretrievably in the process. Boltshauser Architekten are working with a consortium from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain on the Respira research project to investigate how this can be avoided.

  • Stress tests have shown that re-use prestressed concrete slabs deflect significantly less than conventional reinforced concrete slabs.

    Slabs Under Tension 

    Concrete floor slabs have the largest carbon footprint of all building elements. In the past, the material was lost irretrievably during demolition. A Swiss consortium is now cutting standard square slabs from buildings due for demolition and using them to manufacture prestressed segmental concrete elements with a higher structural performance than new reinforced concrete.