Manal Rachdi & Nicolas Laisné

How to Repurpose Paris Metro Stations

Manal Rachdi and Nicolas Laisné are part of the generation of architects who have had to become expert at adapting to the constraints of projects, their contexts, and the diversity of customers involved. They have become significant players on the international scene over the past ten years, taking up the challenge of building towers. This challenge, one of the most arduous the “first art” has to offer, has become a preferred medium of creative expression in architecture, a medium that aspires to the nobility of one of mankind’s oldest dreams: conquering the skies. Their credo is syncretism and daring, humor, hedonism and creativity.

The tower paying homage to Rotterdam port (N. Laisné, 2010), the glass arrow breathing new life in the mythology of Manhattan (M. Rachdi for J. Nouvel, 2008), the Calabrian bridge reinvented as blocks of flats (M. Rachdi, 2010), the Mashrabiya-adorned tower reaching into the Doha sky (N. Laisné pour J. Nouvel, 2010): all the buildings designed by these French architects play with their environment, without exploding or getting lost within it.

Being famous for building up into the sky, their next project takes them in the opposite direction - underground, to the Parisian metro system, where eleven stations sits unused, waiting for a transformation.