Lille Grand Palais (Congrexpo)
1994
Lille, France
Rem Koolhaas (OMA)
Pritzker Prize Laureate
Photo from the Pritzker Prize Page - Reprinted with permission
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The master plan for Euralille, France is the largest realized urban planning project by Rem Koolhaas. The one-million-square-meter business, entertainment and residential complex is grafted onto the small medieval town of Lille, north of Paris. Scheduled for completion in 2004, the complex will include a train station, hotel office buildings, shopping mall and restaurants.
The Grand Palais, or Congrexpo, is the centerpiece for the plan. The building combines exhibition spaces, a concert hall and meeting rooms. One large exterior wall is built of thin corrugated plastic flecked with tiny pieces of aluminum. This surface creates a hard, reflective shell on the outside, but from the interior the wall is translucent.
The building flows with the subtle curves which are a Koolhaas hallmark. The main entry hall has a sharply sloped concrete ceiling. On the exhibition hall ceiling, slim wood slats bows at the center. A staircase to the second floor zigzags upward, while the polished steel side wall slopes inwards, creating a wobbly mirror image of the stairs.
From Rem Koolhaas: "Lille has been shot to ribbons by the French intellectuals. The entire city mafia, I'd say, who call the tune in Paris, have renounced it a hundred per cent. I think that was partly because it has had no intellectual defence." (The Critical Landscape, by Arie Graafland and Jasper de Haan, 1997)
