The Temple of Integrated Mobility is in Rennes
in ARCHITETTURA | architecture
© Cyrille Weiner I The Cesson-Viasilva Park & Ride and Bus Station.
An intermodal transport hub is a structure designed to integrate different means of transport in a single location, whether outdoors or inside a building. These types of infrastructure contribute to: reducing the use of private cars for long journeys; encourage the use of public transport and active transport (such as cycling or walking) for short journeys; help decongest the streets; reduce air and noise pollution; connect peripheral areas with the city centre; facilitate travel to places of work, study and leisure, allow different means of transport to be combined for a single journey, thus offering greater flexibility to users. We can find all these functions in a single building recently inaugurated in Rennes (France): the Cesson-Viasilva Park & Ride and Bus Station.
© Cyrille Weiner I The Cesson-Viasilva Park & Ride and Bus Station.
The complex, designed by O-S Architectes, was designed as a mobility hub for the new Atalante ViaSilva neighborhood in Cesson-Sévigné. Its peculiarity is that it was designed as an open and flexible structure that can be subdivided and even extended. In fact, the building allows for future functional evolutions, i.e. today a car park, tomorrow an office building or even a residential building. For this prerogative, Arcomai awards him the (virtual) award for the best infrastructure of 2024 in Europe.
© O-S Architectes I Ground floor plan, First floor plan and Sections.
The program consists of two buildings connected to each other by a bridge/gallery. The first has an oblong shape, reminiscent of a “transatlantic”, and houses the bus station on the ground floor and an 815-car park, developed in five elevated floors, with vertical connecting paths. The second, smaller, is characterized by a triangular plan with rounded corners. Inside there is a vehicle access and exit ramp to the car park and a 200-space bicycle storage space. The bus station is conceived as a gallery with imposing (double) columns that make the space monumental, although the ceiling is covered with larch wood slats to give the space a more welcoming atmosphere. Access to the parking levels is via a central vertical circulation positioned to allow the quickest access from the parking levels to the forecourt, bus station and nearby metro station.
© Cyrille Weiner I The Cesson-Viasilva Park & Ride and Bus Station.
Both buildings are perceived as volumes, even if the materials used are not continuous. In fact, the building at the entrance to the system, conceived as a pavilion, is lower and completely open to the air. The structural “box” that surrounds it is a metal frame covered with anodized aluminium strips, which also functions as a light filter. Instead, the park-and-ride is wrapped with opalescent glass blades spaced apart which, in addition to dematerializing the bulk of the “transatlantic”, create interesting plays of transparencies. The complex highlights an elegant materiality, expressed through the use of precast or cast-in-place concrete, with a range of rough, smooth and matte finishes. It is an infrastructural building that seeks to go beyond its function through the treatment of its facades and its spatial organization, making this intervention an example of how architectural design is capable of “humanizing” a civil engineering infrastructure in the outskirts.
© Cyrille Weiner I The Cesson-Viasilva Park & Ride and Bus Station.