Located in the heart of the city, the department store was built in the 1980s. Its light stone facades, typical of late modernism, in the 2010s ceased to correspond to the "values" of Galeries Lafayette. To update them, Manuel Gautran was invited.
Her project changed the ratio of glass and stone in the store's appearance: now the lower part of the building is completely transparent, the windows and entrances form a single strip, and the glass there is partly covered with a print of white dots - to emphasize its fragility.
But the main thing was the canopy separating the stone part of the facade from the transparent one: it is a red "corrugated frill" 120 m long, covering three sides of the building. It reaches its maximum width and height at the "key" corner of the store: it seems that here the building coquettishly raised the hem of the dress.
The “fringe” is made of two panels of tempered and laminated glass, between which three layers of red film are sandwiched to achieve the desired color saturation. Its thickness is 22 mm, width - 2.3 - 5.3 m (at the corner - 7.4 m). It runs at a height of 3.5-11 m above ground level. For the dark time of the day, there is an energy efficient backlight reminiscent of the "classic" neon illumination - although from time to time it starts to move and the outline of the canopy is "deconstructed".
