Le Visionnaire, Espace François Dalle

Nominating company: Kuraray
Location: Paris, France

Winning Team

• Interlayer supplier: Kuraray 
• Glass installer and engineering services: Bellapart Group 
• Glass fabricator: sedak GmbH & Co. KG 
• Engineering consultant: RFR
• Architects: Ange-Jacques Gabriel and Alain D. Moatti 
• Photo credit: Florence Joubert

The gorgeous glass structure Le Visionnaire brings the future to meet the past. Ensconced between the stone walls of personal care brand L’Oréal’s historic headquarters in Paris, the striking all-glass façade seems straight out of science fiction. “It’s one thing to imagine such a form, yet another to realize it so successfully,” says Glass Magazine Awards judge John R. Stephenson, senior architect, BRPH.

Befitting its futuristic look, the project represents the first use of curved and spherical tempered glass technology in France, say officials. 

The system’s steel frame is a lamella, diamond-pattern structure composed of quadrilaterals and triangles. The glass façade is crowned by spherical glass supported on its entire periphery, with natural ventilation provided by 13 motorized windows.

Measuring 82 feet high, the oval structure appears as a single, uninterrupted pane of glass, masking its inherent complexity. Tasked by architects Ange-Jacques Gabriel and Alain D. Moatti with an intricate geometric design, installer Bellapart’s team had to identify a construction system capable of delivering the precision needed to maintain reflection continuity across the diverse glass elements, say company officials. 

Each façade element had to be unique in order to achieve the effect, say officials. Bellapart team members used a parametric 3D model and linked the geometry to CNC machining centers in their workshop, resulting in each façade component, including nodes, structural elements, glazing and cladding profiles, being generated individually to achieve the required precision.

“This project breaks all the traditional barriers, almost as if they are working in 4D while the world is still in 2D,” says Glass Magazine Awards judge Nathan Seaman, national sales manager, Architectural Grilles & Sunshades Inc.

Le Visionnaire’s seamless façade is composed of double-curved fritted and tempered laminated insulating glass panels with Trosifol PVB UltraClear, which are two-sided and supported by the primary 3D curved hollow sections and a bespoke stick curtain wall. sedak was the glass laminator and Kuraray supplied the interlayers.