White Gold Over The Seine

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 00:52

The spiritual and cultural center, designed to acquaint the French public with Russian culture and popularize the Russian language, is located on Quai Branly, where the Jean Nouvel Museum of the same name and the Eiffel Tower are also located. The complex is adjacent to the Alma Palace, which is occupied by various government agencies, including departments of the French presidential administration. Earlier, on the site of Wilmott's construction, there was a building of the meteorological service Météo France (1948), which was acquired in January 2010 for demolition by the Russian Federation. This was followed by a competition, which was won by the well-known postmodernist Manuel Nunez-Yanovsky; his project did not suit the then mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, and the architect was replaced by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who was well known to French and Russian customers. The general contractor was Bouygues Bâtiment Ile-de-France. The building permit was obtained in December 2013, the demolition took six months, construction work continued from July 2014 to the end of August 2016, the opening of the center took place on October 18 this year.

The spiritual and cultural center consists of four buildings: the cultural center overlooking the Seine embankment (660 m2) with two exhibition halls, the cathedral (450 m2) facing the Rapp Avenue of the administrative building (1645 m2) with a multifunctional hall for 209 seats, offices of the cultural department the Embassy of the Russian Federation and housing for the employees of the center, and the educational building (1900 m2) near the University street: for 150 students - children and adults - there are classrooms, studios and a library, it is separated from the Alma Palace by a courtyard and a strip of greenery.

The arrangement of structures among the trees corresponds to the typical for the 7th arrondissement of Paris "building in the garden" scheme: out of 2830 m2 of open spaces, 500 m2 is occupied by landscaping. Landscape architect

Louis Benesh (among his works - the reconstruction of the Tuileries garden and the rose garden in Pavlovsk), when choosing the types of flora, was inspired by the "plains of Russia". Mongolian linden and three-bladed maple are planted in the courtyard of the educational building, in the orchard adjacent to the Alma Palace - eastern hawthorn, medlar, pear, decorative apple-Siberian tree of various types ("Everest", abundantly flowering, with red and yellow fruits), hornbeam zelkova. From the side of Rappa Avenue, black alder grows, around the cathedral there is a Tatar maple.

The facades of the temple and three buildings are faced with Burgundy limestone from the Massangi quarry, which was used for many structures in Paris, for example, the Trocadero ensemble. More than 12,000 blocks were spent on the construction of Wilmott: for the cathedral - 72 different profiles, for the rest of the buildings - twenty-five.

The concrete walls of the cathedral were poured in one step: this is a record height (17 m) for France, before that the palm belonged to the complex

National Library of Dominique Perrault (15 m). The domes are made of composite materials typical for ship and aircraft construction, therefore the authors of the project call them the “world premiere” of such technologies in architecture. They weigh much less than those built by traditional methods (the mass of the central dome is 8 tons instead of 42), besides, the construction time was reduced due to their manufacture at the factory, in parallel with work on the site. The materials used are fiberglass, thermoplastic foam and epoxy. White gold (an alloy of gold and palladium) was chosen to cover the domes, so that their shade differed from the bright yellow metal of the sculptures on the bridge of Alexander III and the dome of the House of Invalides.