Serre de recherche

The Etablissement Public du Palais de la Découverte et de la Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (EPPDCSI) has initiated a project to create a new greenhouse on the roof of the Sadi Carnot technical building in 2018, to replace the existing greenhouse built in 1986 when the public facility opened, and to enable the redevelopment of the surrounding area and create a new storage area for sorting waste. The project is part of a plan to revamp the image of the Cité des Sciences and open it up to Pantin. As part of a framework agreement, it involves servicing and fitting out the 7,000 m2 roof of the Sadi Carnot building, which houses all the CSI’s support functions such as staff offices, workshops, technical premises and delivery areas. The aim was to make the roof safe and accessible for new uses, while at the same time renovating the major signs that signal the presence of the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie and renew its image.

The approach to optimising the building’s environmental footprint specific to the new RE2020 was also used to optimise all parts of the building. Despite the very specific constraints of the elevated structure and the particular humidity conditions of the greenhouse, the materials and components were studied on the basis of the experimental protocol that we had developed in partnership with the Sustainable Construction Chair team at ETH Zürich for the exhibition l’Empreinte d’un habitat, construire léger et décarboné, presented at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris at the end of 2021.

The majority of the building’s components were prefabricated, with a limited number of different components and a total of 60 parts for the structure and 112 elements pre-cut and assembled on site for the shell. The site scheduling and management and synthesis tasks enabled the project management team to have full control over the quality of the workmanship and to monitor all the details of the workmanship, as well as the layout of all the equipment, in close collaboration with the contractors. Our attention to detail in the implementation, the coherence of the assemblies and the integration of the operating methods specific to each building trade, combined with a rigorous methodology in which each operation is anticipated by a digital simulation, enabled us to convince all the parties involved of the architectural and environmental challenges specific to this operation. The building has a mass per unit area of 600 kg/m2 and a carbon footprint of 300 kg CO² eq/m², with the potential for re-use accounting for 90% of the structure’s environmental impact. For the architects, it was a question of demonstrating lightweight, carbon-free circular architecture.