The central Pavilion of Sciences Po’s new urban campus as part of its “Coeur 2022” project revisits the typology of the inner-city campus in the delicate urban setting of central Paris. Woven into the historic fabric of the Hotel de l’Artillerie in the 7th Arrondissement, the project creates links between the three existing cloisters, the old and the new buildings, to adapt them into one heterogeneous and integrated academic institution.

Through fine-tuned proportions and transparency, the Pavilion becomes the symbolic and functional heart of the new campus. Its strength lies in the choice of a pure architectural language with a heavy emphasis on how the people complete the built environment with interchangeable partitions, ever-present natural light and a clear sense of openness.

The hard and crisp materiality is in respectful harmony with the dignified and sparsely decorated architecture of the heritage buildings. It plays with different nuances of grey – the grey of the concrete, of the steel, of the skies of Paris as reflected in the glass – to create a uniform, universal and timeless aesthetic, bringing out the honest beauty of the slabs, the columns and the glazing.

The Sciences Po “Coeur 2022” was completed at the end of 2021 and inaugurated in January 2022.