immeuble rue Lecourbe

PROJECT : immeuble rue Lecourbe
STATUT : Project discontinued before completion
TOTAL AREA : 340 m² / 3660 sqf
LOCATION : Paris, FRANCE
YEAR : 2022

Contemporary Rooftop Extension on a Brick Building

This rooftop extension project explores the continuity of the built environment and the legibility of different architectural periods. Rather than erasing the existing structure, the intervention seeks to reveal the value of this old brick building, a witness to an urban history shaped by successive transformations within the neighbourhood.

The contemporary extension is delicately placed on top of the existing building, without attempting to imitate it. It asserts a new, clear and confident architectural language, creating a dialogue with the heritage building without concealing it. The project thus becomes a seam between the existing building, rooted in materiality and memory, and a contemporary architecture shaped by today’s environmental challenges.

The added volume integrates three additional residential levels, allowing new apartments to be created without consuming more land. This vertical densification extends the existing building within a controlled urban renewal approach.

The rooftop extension is defined by a thick, perforated envelope composed of dark panels and openings that widely integrate vegetation. This first skin creates depth across the façade, protects the openings, filters views and offers a new quality of use for the dwellings.

Vegetation, integrated into the thickness of the façade, accompanies each opening and transforms the rooftop extension into an inhabited landscape. The planters extend the interior spaces outwards, while bringing freshness, privacy and biodiversity into the urban setting.

The project is also part of an ambitious environmental approach. The envelope integrates photovoltaic panels and is combined with a green roof, helping to improve the overall performance of the building, limit summer overheating and reduce rainwater runoff into the city’s drainage network.

The rooftop extension therefore does more than add living space: it continues the history of the building, improves its performance and proposes a new way of inhabiting the city, between heritage, contemporary architecture and the presence of living nature.