La Poste du Louvre

Built between 1878 and 1888 by the architect Julien Guadet for the national post office, this building is emblematic of the great construction sites of its era and fits the typology of the grand boulevards around it. Behind the classical dressed stone facades, ordered by powerful buttresses, long-span metal frames of the Eiffel type already allowed a great deal of flexibility.

Over almost a century and a half the building was adapted and transformed to follow the evolution of postal work, mostly between the 1960s and the 1980s. The ground floor of the sorting factory was turned into a mezzanine for parking and the movement of postal vehicles, and after a fire in 1975 the original attic was replaced by a flat roof, profoundly changing the building.

In 2012 a consultation for the project drew 70 French and international teams, and in July of that year the French practice was selected. Work began in 2016 and the spaces were handed to their new occupants in 2021.

The project turns an industrial block into an urban block open to its neighbourhood. The metal structure is revealed and the courtyard becomes a covered atrium ringed by galleries, while the building now gathers a mix of uses, among them a hotel, offices, social housing, a nursery, shops and a post office.