Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport is one of the largest and fastest growing air hubs in continental Europe. Its scale is evidenced by at least the fact that today there are 10 business parks and several large logistics complexes, as well as a developed hotel network on the territory of the airport. Perhaps the only thing that many airport employees and passengers (which is more than 150 thousand people a day) lacked was a shopping and entertainment complex where you can eat, shop and watch a movie after a shift or while waiting for a connecting flight. Also, this complex is designed for residents of the adjacent territories, which will be developed within the framework of the "Greater Paris" program. Aeroville, with a total retail space of over 84,000 m2, aims to fill this gap by making the main airport in Paris the most "versatile" transport hub in Europe.
The proximity to the airport influenced not only the name of the new complex, but also its architectural and planning solution. Aeroville, located on a site with a total area of 11 hectares, is a whole city: between its buildings there are internal “streets”, from where you can watch the landing and taking off planes. For this, the roof is partially glazed, and the perspective of the “streets” is closed by glazed consoles - a kind of window into the world of aviation.
The anchor tenants of the complex include a hypermarket of the Auchan chain and a 12-screen cinema of the EuropaCorp chain, one of the founders of which is director Luc Besson. There is a parking lot in the underground part of the complex, and the height difference on the site allowed the architect to raise the northern entrance to it to ground level and thereby provide space for storing cars with daylight and ventilation.
The total length of the complex is a little more than a kilometer, and the solution of the facades of such a long building became almost the main challenge for the architect in this project. For the complex, the main function of which is trade, Philippe Chiambaretta found a truly universal move: the facades of this “paradise of consumerism” were transformed into a kind of posters on which logos were applied by the method of perforation (“tattoos”, as the author of the project himself says). Only as a logo, not the brands presented inside the complex are used here, but its very name, which the architect breaks down into letters, using each of them to design a particular building. This allows you to make the drawing of the facades moderately abstract and at the same time corresponding to the program of the complex.
