The Director’s House is part of a series of industrial buildings belonging to the former SUDAC factory located on quai Panhard-et-Levassor, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Built for residential use, it was later used as offices for the administration of the plant then abandoned. Semapa, developer of the Paris Rive Gauche mixed-used area (ZAC), wanted to transform and rehabilitate the house into an information space for the Masséna Nord/ Bruneseau ZAC.

Consisting of two floors above ground and a basement, the dimensions of the house are modest:  12,60m in length by 10,60m in width, with a height of 11.70m. Whilst the building envelope was completely renovated in 2008, the interior floors and circulation areas were not at all fit or sized for future public reception. To begin with we proposed the complete removal of existing interior elements, to be replaced, in a radical intervention, by a new expressive architectural feature, a cylinder of glass and metal hanging in the emptied volume of the house.

Because the cylinder houses a large room of 80 seats for conferences and meetings, we proposed to conceive it as the only "heated" part of the project, all the other volumes having simple ventilation only. This cylinder, cantilevered off a concrete stem that comprises vertical circulation on the Seine side, contains in its "thick" steel-structure floors all the project’s technical equipment (air handling, ventilation, heating, lighting) and stage fitting (mobile devices).  A movable ceiling system with pulleys on the underside of the cylinder allows a large model of the ZAC to be lifted from ground floor level so providing a totally free floor area when needed. Similarly, on the mezzanine, all the electrical components and stage setup are housed inside the upper floor of the cylinder. The existing brick walls, reinforced by a secondary steel structure, which provides wind bracing, were left in their original condition, while all the floors are constructed using a quartz mix concrete.

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