Projects
Restructuring of the Cour des Comptes (Court of Auditors) Paris, France
In 1898 architect Constant Moyaux was asked to design and build premises for the archive of the Court of Auditors in a project that would last a decade. The archive building is a tribute to the Chicago School with its moulded brick facades looking onto the courtyard and its structural functional pragmatism: designed to hold files of financial documents, the building was to be filed with colossal masonry shelving. Perpendicular to the outer circulation areas, the corridors to the shelves were lit with natural light, thanks to the windows on the facade facing the courtyard which separates the archive from the Palais Cambon housing the courtrooms, the library and other important areas for the magistrates. Around the stone plinth, topped with glass, there extends eight floors in an elegant inlaid work of terracotta interspersed with the steel of cabochons and crosses with connecting rod ends, plus limestone keystones and cornices, flat or crenellated. Between 1976 and 1978, a central silo, consisting of an independent structure, hid the atrium on five floors, offering an essential addition to the storehouse. In 2000, to increase its personnel so that it could also handle certification of the State Budget, the institution decided to outsource its archive, leaving the building that housed it free for the new arrivals and to house the various branch offices which until then were spread around the district. The restructuring was very complex, due to many constraints, including registration of the facades and the courtyard roof in the Additional Inventory of Historic Monuments. After a technical audit the central silo was completely dismantled and the rest of the building was restructured to transform each floor into office space. This change in purpose was a real challenge, since the indispensable structural renewal had to avoid reducing the ceiling height which was already very low.
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