Dominique Perrault is one of the most important figures of contemporary French architecture. Many works around the world carry his name, including the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the Velodrome and the Olympic swimming pool in Berlin and the Ewha University campus in Seoul. The book explores the design process by researching the experimental foundations that are the source of a series of works designed or partially built.

On June 4, 2013 the new building of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will be inaugurated, in the presence of Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL, Dominique Perrault, architect, and Henri Muhr, CEO of  Steiner AG.

The former EPFL Central Library (Building BI) now houses most of the EPFL’s central services.
This is the first of the three projects to emerge on the campus, and the first completion of the architect in Switzerland.
On this occasion the monographic exhibition “Territoires et Horizons” will be held in the building from June 4 – 29. This exhibition will display Dominique Perrault’s projects in Switzerland, providing a special focus on the notion of contemporary campus.

The catalog will be published by Editions Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, PPUR.

The project document is available at the following address:
issuu.com/dparchitecture/docs/habiterlegrandparis

Dominique Perrault is member of the scientific council of the International Workshop on Greater Paris (AIGP or “Atelier International du Grand Paris”) since 2012. As representative of a multidisciplinary team – which consists among others of the urban planner and architect Brigitte Loye Deroubaix, the philosopher Frédéric Migayrou, the urban planner Jean-Louis Subileau, the mathematician Henri Berestycki, the filmmaker Richard Copans, and several architects and urban planners from DPA – he ensures the link between the scientific council of the AIGP and this laboratory of applied ideas.
Dominique Perrault, together with the other fourteen teams of the scientific council, has presented a first reflection on “Living in Greater Paris” at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale Universitaire on March 22, and at a press conference at the Atelier International du Grand Paris situated at the Palais de Tokyo on April 19. The proposed device of the “Hotel Metropole” is the result of various reflections on the metropolis: the acknowledgment that the metropolis is not the city, the analysis and formalization of new ways of living, the “tensioning” of the existing and the ambition to elaborate a tool that can accompany the metropolitan fact with both urgency and precaution. In terms of resources the “Hotel Metropole” is a minimalist scheme that installs itself on available ground, which may be awaiting its transformation, allowing to test the potential of its fabric and trying to infiltrate urbanity with a certain smoothness rather than imposing a priori a predefined urban model.

Dominique Perrault is a member of the Scientific Council of the Grand Paris (2008) and the Scientific Council of the International Workshop on Grand Paris (2012).
Besides being a complex territorial development with an uncertain perimeter on the scales of distant times, the “Grand Paris” is also synonym for an emerging metropolitan consciousness. On this blog we will collect representations of an evolving territory with the use of photos, snapshots and urban promenades – testimonies of a visual culture which is starting to become more visible in public space. We inquire the “Grand Paris” from its graphic production in order to understand it better.