Saint-Gobain Company, leader in high performance building material, will establish its new headquarters in a new tower developed by Generali Real Estate in the La Défense business district of Paris.
Designed to become the future international showcase of Saint-Gobain, the project of about 49,000 sqm of floor space on 44 floors and 165 meters high, aims to achieve an exemplary level of environmental quality with a strong emphasis on good site integration, energy performance and user comfort.
The Saint-Gobain Tower is designed to play with the light. Light is the essential material for the project. This tower is a glass assembly and by using the sides, angles and the nature of glass an alternative construction of transparency or reflection is created. The aim is to give the building a magical dimension that changes with time and your vantage point.
Another way of creating emotion is to make the tower into a sculpture. A sculpture that uses new geometry: rhombohedrons. A rhombohedron is a cube whose faces are rhombi or parallelograms instead of squares or rectangles. An instant dynamic is created. With the same height and volume as a regular straight prism, the outline soars upwards and the tower stands out from the rest.
This tower puts nature center stage: Large greenhouses contribute to the image and environmental performance and gardens on all floors can be directly accessed from the office areas. The tower seems to float above the ground. Its slanted undersides widen the field of vision from the esplanade and accompany the new stairs that link it with the ring road below.
In this way, the tower adds to the much sought-after urban cohesion and to the reurbanization of the ring road. Its morphology is designed to display main and expressive façades in all directions. It becomes a link between the La Défense esplanade, the ring road and districts of Courbevoie.
An environmental and energy-efficient tower
The tower’s architecture has been designed around environmental concerns. An array of spatial, architectural and technical solutions contribute to the efficiency of the tower in this regard. The plants themselves play a part in the cooling process by naturally vaporizing the rainwater used for watering. Source and images, Courtesy of Valode & Pistre architects.