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LOCATION
LYON, FRANCE
ARCHITECT
JAKOB + MACFARLANE
Before you even see the Orange Cube - whether in photographs or in reality, standing by the riverbank in Lyon - the name conveys the essence of the latest building designed by Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane. Like much of the architects' spirited yet elegant work, the Orange Cube signals colour and geometry. Or, you might say, design and structure, which is generally the case with Jakob + MacFarlane's impressive output over the last decade.
In their most memorable buildings, the intuitive and the rational coincide, reinforcing and inflecting one another, such as their project for the Docks de Paris (AR February 2009), in which a concrete warehouse on the edge of the Seine acts as a foil for a parasitical growth creeping along the riverside frontage. Made of tubular steel infilled with moiré patterned glazing, this 'plug over', as MacFarlane described it, contains a network of staircases that convey visitors around the renovated warehouse.
The site for the Orange Cube is another waterfront locale, a long flat peninsula between the Rhône and Saône. Where these rivers join into one, Coop Himmelb(l)au is building the dramatic Musée des Confluences, evidence of the ambition driving the redevelopment of this post-industrial quarter. Jakob + MacFarlane's building looks west from the mid-point of this fluvial peninsula, across the Saône to an almost bucolic hillside with Italianate gardens and discrete neo-classical institutions. The Orange Cube is therefore, as Roland Barthes noted apropos the Eiffel Tower, both...