Designed by Barbotin + Gresham Architects, The Media Library and Cultural Center is located in the town of Lisses, 30 kilometers to the south of Paris, in a zone developed during the period of suburban expansion undertaken in the 1970s around the French capital, an urban extension consisting of social and sports facilities, shops, housing and parking organized along a pedestrian path, the Mail de l?Ile de France. The new project was intended to replace an existing cultural and administrative center on the same site, a building severely damaged from years of repeated acts of vandalism.

The project?s built anatomy is the result of a series of ?forces? generated from its physical, political, social and technical context, and which in turn engender its spatial and built order, its materiality, and its position relative to the immediate context. Its program embodies the politico-cultural decision to house two independent and complementary entities within the same structure, the Colette Library (run by the Communauté d?agglomération d?Evry center Essonne) and the Jean Cocteau Cultural center (managed by Lisses), both of which would share the use of an 80-seat auditorium.
In order to accommodate the program, the proposed building?s irregular trapezoidal footprint extends to the physical limits of the site, a perimeter which is itself the result of successive modifications to the property limits. A series of functional constraints help to structure the building?s spatial order:...