From inherited model to 21st-century campus

Inaugurated in 1964, the campus designed by René Coulon and Robert Joffet was a modernist manifesto. Inspired by major Anglo-Saxon campuses, it combined pedagogy, autonomy, and quality of life within a large-scale geometric composition. Long celebrated, this inherited model now reveals its limits. The accumulation of layers, the fading of original intentions, disconnected additions, and the increasing dominance of cars have blurred the domain’s legibility and functional coherence.

Our proposal is grounded in one principle: building with what already exists. In contrast to a logic of rupture, PCA-STREAM offers a critical and strategic reading of the site, understood as a palimpsest, a fragmented territory to be reconnected, reinterpreted, and reactivated. By restoring historical continuities and fostering new synergies between built entities, the project reclaims the campus as an active framework for academic and collective life.

Landscape as a framework for use and narrative

Here, the landscape is not a backdrop, it is a structure. From the 18th-century formal gardens to the vast modernist expanses of the 20th century, the HEC park encapsulates the evolving relationships between nature, power, and knowledge. This long history becomes project material. By reintroducing pedestrian pathways, reducing impermeable surfaces, and revitalizing residual spaces, the proposal restores the landscape’s connective, breathing, and narrative potential.

This active approach to landscape informs every scale of the project. It enables situated learning, careful attention to transitions, and the capacity to welcome the unexpected. Learning outdoors, moving with pleasure, collectively inhabiting a territory, these are sensitive experiences that foster rootedness, memory, and a sense of belonging. The park becomes a pedagogical and political tool,  an ecology applied to academic space.

Campus Heart: instituting a new centrality

The project culminates in the creation of a new unifying building: the Campus Heart. It addresses a long-standing absence, that of a common, welcoming, and legible place, one that embodies the school’s contemporary values. Positioned at the intersection of key flows, the building hosts the campus’s transversal functions: student life, dining, coworking, research, governance, all within a modular and open structure designed to accommodate diverse rhythms and uses.

Its architecture embraces expressive materiality (wood, light, connection to the ground), while avoiding any spectacular gesture. It signals meaning, not form. Rooted in the site’s history and oriented toward future use, the Campus Heart establishes a new space of convergence for a school grounded in collectivity, excellence, and care. It is the visible knot of a recomposed campus.