Inauguration of the Paris-Saclay Shared Education Building (BEM)

The Shared Education Building – BEM – is, in essence, a place of gathering and sharing. It offers a unique setting to develop future ways of studying by promoting interactivity and innovative teaching methods. The project designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects (manager), OXO architects - Manal Rachdi, Nicolas Laisné architects and DREAM – Dimitri Roussel, invites collaboration and exchanges between students, researchers and guests.

The building reads like an open space revealing the activities taking place in its heart. Its generous atrium, bathed in natural light, shelters young trees and a set of footbridges and staircases which are all platforms and "spontaneous amphitheaters" allowing teachers, researchers and students from the seven Grandes Écoles of Engineering together to get together and work.

The building has a capacity of 1.470 students and offers the large Claudine Hermann amphitheater with 250 seats and three amphitheaters with 80 seats on the ground floor, one of which is called Claire Girard. In addition to these lecture halls, there are around fifty classrooms spread over the three floors (17 per level); but also innovative educational spaces, remote teaching and videoconferencing rooms, collaborative work spaces and project rooms for an educational offering focused on interactivity and digital tools. With all these synergies, the BEM offers the spaces and material means so that Schools can deliver and share their lessons and new educational practices.

The architectural approach is based on an analysis of the particular environment of the Saclay plateau. With regard to climatic conditions (temperature, irradiation, wind, hygrometry), the exterior atmospheres are transcribed into sensory temperature. Thus, thanks to the automatic opening and closing of openings on the facade (also used for natural smoke extraction from the hall), ventilation is natural and makes it possible to ventilate and cool the large volume of the hall. Playing a role as a thermal buffer for the classrooms, the hall promotes overall temperature management.

Indeed, the design of the building is designed with the aim of not having to use air conditioning systems, except for the amphitheaters with particular hygrothermal comfort. The facade louvers open based on a humidity and temperature probe.

The large volume of the atrium develops behind a glass facade on the west side largely protected by the overhang of the origami sunshade roof.

The interweaving of the walkways and stairs constitute solar masks to protect the interior volume. The design of the building and the heated screed in the atrium make it possible to reduce the use of radiators provided in the classrooms, which are only necessary as backup on a few Monday mornings in winter.

A building that promotes interactivity, sharing and educational innovation, bathed in soft light and vegetation

• The atrium, with multiple walkways, stairs and platforms, gives shape to the project. It breaks the traditional image of a teaching building by freeing itself symbolically and physically from the classic typology of the classroom. The free stairs in the atrium offer a feeling of space, and the platforms, designed like spontaneous amphitheaters, a continuous learning path creating opportunities for continuity of lessons, meetings and dialogue. Learning is projected and developed there.
• The vegetation. This architecture opens to light and vegetation to fuel the different aspects of learning: communication, concentration, collaboration and interaction. Ten exterior trees 10 to 15 m high (maple and linden) with a forest appearance in connection with the future park, were selected upstream of the project, in a spirit of coherence of the planted layout along the building and the new articulation landscape of the opening of the district. The eight interior trees were chosen for their low maintenance. With small leaves, their size is 6 to 9m. They play a role in the quality of the interior volume, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.
• Transparency. A non-hierarchical and fluid space letting in light and offering a view of the west of the district on the upper floors.