Jakob + Macfarlane: city of fashion and design, Paris, France.

Jakob + Macfarlane's aptitude for working with existing buildings has been amply demonstrated in these pages, most recently with their imaginative conversion of Claude Vasconi's Renault factory into a company communications centre (AR June 2005). This latest project reprises and consolidates the theme of creative reuse, transforming a turn-of-the-century dockside depot on the edge of the River Seine into an armature for a snazzy new design and fashion museum.

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The Docks of Paris (as the building is known), is a long, thin, functional warehouse on the Quai D'Austerlitz in the shadow of Perrault's towering Bibliotheque Nationale. Originally built in 1907, it was used to store goods brought up the Seine by barge, which were then transported onwards by dray or train. In 2005, the Parisian city authorities staged a competition for an ambitious cultural development on the site, as part of an ongoing programme of urban revitalisation in the languishing 13th arrondissement. The brief includes a fashion school (Institut Francais de la Mode), exhibition spaces, music production studios, bookshops, cafes and restaurants. Competitors were given the option of incorporating the existing depot structure into their proposals, an option exploited by Jakob + Macfarlane through a cleverly judged 'Plug-Over' sequence of organic additions and insertions.

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The concrete grid forms a matrix for the new parts that snake around and through the orthogonal geometry, subverting and enriching. A new structural system, derived from systematic deformation of the grid, supports a skin of glass and steel as well as an enlarged, habitable roofscape with more than a whiff of Yokohama Port Terminal about it. The Plug-Over principle exploits the building envelope and creates a continuous public route that progressively loops up from waterfront level to the roof deck and down again, so people are free to explore and the building becomes an uninhibited part of the urban condition. Completion is due in mid 2008. C. S.

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