Lafayette Anticipation
Building transformation for the Galeries Lafayette Foundation headquarters
"These are not really spaces... rather an accumulation of hasty implementations of disposable modernities. And these are the mandatory ingredients to make spaces of them again: there is no sense to empty everything, nor to add anything else." - working notes, 2013
In early 2013, Rotor was invited to participate in the debates around the creation of the Galeries Lafayette Corporate Foundation, and to design the events tied to the Foundation's launch. The first exchanges were about the Proleégomènes, a multi-day event designed to invest part of 9 rue du Plâtre, the foundation's future headquarters.
A turnaround took place when the proposal to take the lead was put on the table: why not go beyond the few days and a few spaces, why not exploit the temporary status of the entire building as a tool to welcome alternative productions as of now, to open up to fragile occupations? Why not use the building to make the Foundation exist now?
Rotor's intervention covers the whole building during the entire period preceding its complete transformation. What was a closed, empty, obsolete and waiting space, was subjected to a series of adjustments. The challenge was to open, refresh and un-suffocate spaces loaded with the aesthetic connotations of its previous uses. Given the extremely limited budget of the project, much of the material resources already present in the building were used: the work was divided into strategies for subtraction, displacement, and reuse of materials.
More information on our intervention on the Lafayette Anticipation website.
