Itinerary of an industrial archaeology : Lili Boulanger school in Saint Denis

Interview with Davide Persanti, architect and project manager.

” This is my 1st project as project manager. It’s very important to me,” confides Davide.

The site is a former car paint factory that used very powerful solvents stored in concrete tanks dug into the ground. Over time, the concrete has cracked, causing major leaks of toxic products that have even infiltrated the groundwater. And the building that was to be removed turned out to contain asbestos.
These discoveries, made after the competition, took the teams by surprise. The teams at Saint-Denis town hall changed: the new contracting authority increased the budget for the complete clean-up of the site and asked the agency to add classrooms without increasing the volume of the building.

archi5 is keen to preserve the industrial memory of the site by preserving part of the building’s facade that was destined to disappear. “The existing façade has become our matrix”, Davide emphasises. The architecture is intended to be formal. For this project, the team created a mathematical rule. It decided on a grid between the columns, which, once again, gave the grid for the windows, which in turn, once again, gave the grid for the standing seams on the roof. In this way, the exterior and interior are re-scaled.

“Giving clear, rigid rules means that the site teams can check on their own that their work is being carried out properly. They can’t make any mistakes. My obsession with the grid in this project extends right down to the wooden façades,” laughs Davide.

“I think that this geometric effort linked to the site’s mechanical past can be felt when you are inside the building, but it has lost some of the hardness that was not specific to children,” he continues.

The programme was drawn up in 2016. “In less than 10 years, the attitude of building owners towards environmental awareness has changed a lot. At the time, there was less talk of green buildings, but the town of Saint-Denis listened right from the competition phase.”

The building, which is highly efficient from an energy point of view, is avant-garde for its time: almost the entire building is made of wood (the stairwells are made of concrete for regulatory reasons), the false ceilings are made of wood fibres, and the exterior insulation is made of plant fibres…

“These requirements are an integral part of the project presented by the agency, but the programme helped us,” confides the project manager.

The landscaping aspect is very important in the new school complex. The project includes green roofs to encourage biodiversity, an oasis courtyard to keep the site cool, a greenhouse and an educational garden so that children can discover the cycles of nature. Small water collectors and photovoltaic panels have been installed to explain to the children how this ecological building works.

“It’s a project that I’ve had a good feeling about from the start, and it’s one that’s come together quite naturally. It’s a simple, balanced project where everything works,” concludes Davide.

Davide Persanti, project manager 

Davide studied architecture at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, graduating Cum Laude. He built up his career in Rome. His interest in history led him to work on astonishing archaeological sites in Italy, Syria and Iraq. He was involved in the restoration and extension of the National Museum in Damascus, and in the musealisation of the royal tombs of Ur, which were destined to become an open-air museum. In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Cornelius Hertling – Leonardo da Vinci scholarship in Paris and joined archi5. Faithful to the heritage of a place, David approaches the Groupe Scolaire Lili Boulanger as “industrial archaeology”.