The Orange Cube is part of Lyon Confluence, a comprehensive redevelopment program for Lyon's harbor area, and its scope was originally designed to symbolize the renovation of former grim shipyards. That is why for the facades of this building, the architects chose the most optimistic of the traditional colors of the shipbuilding industry - orange.
The five-story building really has the shape of a cube, but it strikingly differs from the neighboring hangar-like buildings not only in its bright color, but also in the plasticity of the facades. The fact is that the architects chose perforated steel as the facing material - holes of different sizes and shapes are made in each sheet, so that from a distance the orange building resembles a giant slice of cheese. This mischievous culinary association is greatly enhanced by the atrium, designed in the form of a round funnel. From the inside, the atrium is formed by a series of galleries uniting office blocks of several floors, but from the outside it seems that a meteorite has hit the building, causing one corner of it to be pushed deep inside. There are similar "holes" on the other sides of the cube - one at ground level (and serves as a design for the entrance zone), the second at the level of the roof. According to the architects, these elements "not only break the rigid geometry of the building, but also help create a fundamentally new relationship between the new building and the surrounding space."
In the two-storey foyer of the building, showrooms are organized, the walls of which are decorated in the same way as the facades: in sixty "cheese holes" there are samples of designer furniture and other works of the best European designers.
The atrium and the "porous" structure of the façade as a whole make it possible to provide all the interior spaces of the cube with a sufficient amount of daylight. The flat roof of the complex is partially landscaped and turned into a public area for office staff to relax. From it, a truly breathtaking view opens up over the city and the river.
A. M.
