RATP Habitat Headquarters
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
Atelier du Pont has envisioned a three-story, wood-frame building in Paris 20th arrondissement. Sculpted into steps, it blends into the surrounding landscape, adapting to its environment with a series of south-facing terraces that render the rooftops fully inhabitable. Indoors, emphasis was given to the conviviality, adaptability, and domesticity of the workspaces for RATP Habitat’s various teams.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
The headquarters of RATP Habitat, the social housing developer that belongs to the eponymous group, are situated within a densely constructed block in Paris. They are accessible by passing under the portico of an apartment building. The structure occupies the entire parcel, a succession of rooftop gardens compensating for the lack of open space on the ground level. The glued-laminated timber framework does not overload the existing parking structure, which was maintained and reinforced. It also limited noise levels for the neighbouring buildings during construction.
The three-story building includes mainly open, reconfigurable office spaces, areas for people to meet and socialize (a kitchen, cafeteria, and café), formal and informal conference rooms, reconfigurable collaborative workspaces, and a reception area to welcome the public. Large terraces provide space for people to relax and work outside. Atelier du Pont also designed all the interior and exterior layouts, furniture, and signage for the project, and it worked with RATP Habitat on changing how people work by identifying the needs of employees within the various departments.
Key objectives for sustainability
The project has very high environmental ambitions. They include obtaining a “VERY GOOD” BREEAM label, an “Excellent” HQE Bâtiment Durable label, an “E2C2” Energie Carbone (E+C-) label, and a Paris Climate Energy Plan label.
To this end, systems were integrated into the project from its launch to favour soft mobility (bicycles and scooters, in consideration of employee uses and habits). The underground parking was preserved during the existing building's demolition and serves as the project’s foundation. Spaces were added for carpooling along with electric vehicle charging stations.
The building is highly compact, and its patios ensure an efficient, natural ventilation. It is equipped with solar panels on the roof and triple-glazed windows that have integrated, adjustable shades.
A special effort was made to use A+ category finishing materials to create optimal air quality. The project also makes extensive use of natural lighting.
All the wood comes from sustainably managed forests and is certified FSC or PEFC. The wood was treated with products that are creosote- and PCP-free. All wood treatments are certified CTB P+ and bear a “Vert Excell” label. The glue used for the glued-laminate timber and the finger joints in the wood are low in VOC emissions and free of PCP.
All the outdoor spaces, terraces, and patios are extensively landscaped with greenery. A rooftop apple orchard and vegetable garden are tended to by a local association with and for RATP Habitat's employees (the “Green Team”).
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The project seeks to break with traditional office norms by focusing on three core concepts:
- Modularity / Co-design
- Work / Exterior
- Comfort / Conviviality
The spaces are flexible and modular and can be partitioned using movable acoustic panels. Gutters throughout the floor allow for a reconfiguration of the space as needed. The layout was custom-designed, at times reusing some employee furniture to minimise waste.
The garden terraces and patios create an intimate relationship between nature and architecture. They contribute to the image of RATP Habitat’s new headquarters as a key partner in the city’s responsible development. The three levels of terraces are connected to one another by large flights of steps that allow people to move from one level to another without having to go back inside.
Workspaces are arranged around patios that distribute natural light throughout the building.
The interior, wood stringer stairwells have been left open to allow natural light to filter in. They encourage employees to take the stairs instead of the elevator, which thus become another meeting point. On the two working floors and the reception floor, the colours are warm and soft, the wood has been left with a natural finish, and the fabrics are comfortable: the subtle interplay of the furniture selected creates a domestic ambiance that renders the offices and the workspaces friendlier. The spaces for socialising have different functions so that people will use them throughout the day.
Key objectives for inclusion
The spaces are designed to improve quality of life and to integrate themselves gently and smoothly into this block, both for the employees and the neighbouring inhabitants, by using high-quality materials in the interior and on the facade.
The offices are arranged in an agile manner to host “nomadic” employees. In fact, all people need to work is a laptop and Internet connection, wherever they may be (even on the terraces). This gives employees greater flexibility in managing and organising their workday. This work method also allows information to be received and processed in real time, despite any geographic distances. It also helps decompartmentalise work hierarchies.
There are exterior, modular co-working spaces, conference rooms, and workspaces, especially on the terraces. Employees can also access multiple-use spaces to relax, read books and magazines, play cards, ping-pong, and more.
Results in relation to category
Employee participation highlighted three major needs that were addressed in the project.
- Intersectionality, a need that arose both in response to the pandemic lockdowns and especially the company’s previous office spaces, which were scattered between different sites and on different floors of a building shared with other organisations. Their specific request was to “make sense” of the space by creating shared, collaborative areas next to other, more private spaces that are needed from time to time (for confidential meetings, small groups, a need to concentrate, etc.).
- “Living together”: by requesting the creation of landscaped areas and working spaces within the building, the employees embraced the project’s dual nature. The building provides an open, collaborative space where employees can interact and work together with the feeling of belonging to the place. Employees feel “at home”: despite having moved in between lockdowns, there is a palpable desire to come to work in person and to see one another.
- The collaboration between the various departments and their involvement from the project’s initial phases contributed to the development of the workspaces, from the largest to the smallest, in a manner that was customised for each department, down to the partitioning of the space in response to the needs of each department and each employee.
Ultimately, the RATP Habitat headquarters are a source of pride for users, both the employees who work there and those who work as concierges at the various residences spread across the Ile-de-France, who enjoy coming for trainings and to meet their colleagues.
How Citizens benefit
The co-design of the workspaces and the support provided for the transition took the form of regular, iterative workshops in which an RATP Habitat employee representative transmitted the precisely defined needs for each department in terms of the equipment and new working methods to be adopted.
The first phase involved identifying, storing, and at time reconditioning furniture according to the principles developed during the workshops. According to the needs expressed, new furniture was then selected to encourage intersectionality and create new possibilities in the various workspaces. This led to a selection of taller furniture for working both seated and standing up to encourage mobility throughout the workspace, and of specific chair types that corresponded to user demands for comfort, custom-sized designed furniture...
Employees chose their own personal spaces and saw that their choice of mobility was incorporated into the project’s development.
Before delivery, several employees set up a volunteer team to manage the headquarters’ green spaces through an urban agriculture and biodiversity protection programme that was supported by management and the association Veni Verdi. To encourage further appropriation, events have been organised by management, the communications department, and the employees themselves to breathe life into the building, such as a green space party, the packaging of donations and health kits for RATP Habitat renters in difficulty, lunches (soups, herbal teas, and refreshments made with vegetables from the garden), and afterwork parties.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
RATP Habitat entrusted Atelier du Pont with a complete mission that included interior layouts, furniture, signage, as well as providing support for the evolution of working modes in the form of several workshops that identified both the overall organisation and then also the details of how each department works (from macro to micro-zoning), down to the level of each employee, who was able to choose their own office within the space reserved to their department.
Learning transferred to other parties
Well-being in the workplace lies at the core of the exploratory process surrounding the design of service-related programmes, and the project’s iterative, participative approach proposes a novel way of confronting the current challenges in designing workspaces. The results of the creative processes took the form of a “lexicon” of environments proposed to the site’s occupants, who then made choices according to their needs and preferences, thus appropriating the new identity of their workplace.
This approach can be applied to any new programme for designing service-related architecture. The employees’ appropriation of the workplace and well-being became an even greater priority in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the spread of remote working.
The company’s appropriation of its building has also given rise to several company projects, such as urban agriculture and the training of building concierges managed by RATP Habitat in creating and tending shared gardens, thus indirectly also to the development of shared green spaces in the RATP building programmes located across the entire Ile-de-France region.
We believe that this method provides an optimal response to the new design challenges we face, all the while remaining compatible with the expression of a collective company spirit and the provision of appropriate responses to the environmental challenges we face.