Le Monde — The White Tree, Montpellier's ultimate folly

The Japanese Architect Sou Fujimoto Partnered with Three Frenchmen to Invent a Building Bristling with Balconies

By Isabelle Regnier

A beautiful white meringue that someone had exploded from the inside? A baobab with white scales, light as the wind? What is this Arbre Blanc that has just sprung up on the banks of the Lez, to the east of Montpellier, and which was completed in a few months? Sixteen floors of apartments wrapped in a carapace of pergola balconies in white lacquered aluminum. On the roof, a bar open to the public offers a breathtaking view of Montpellier, Pic Saint-Loup, the first reliefs of the Cévennes. On the ground floor, a small art center and a restaurant. In the garden that extends the neighboring public park, the terrace opens directly onto the river.

Replace Pic Saint-Loup with Mount Fuji and this metallic extravagance with its changing reflections would seem to come straight out of Hayao Miyazaki's phantasmagoric universe. The philosophy of the Japanese filmmaker, his love of nature and low-tech machines are, in fact, not foreign to the universe of his compatriot Sou Fujimoto, the architect who, in addition to the project, partnered in 2013 with young Frenchmen Manal Rachdi (founder of the OXO Architectes agency), Nicolas Laisné and Dimitri Roussel (then associates within the Laisné-Roussel agency) to form a team with them.

They needed a partnership of this international scope to hope to win the competition launched by the city of Montpellier within the framework of the Folies Architecturales of the 21st century, an ambitious commissioning project launched by the mayor, Hélène Mandroux and interrupted as early as 2014 by her successor, Philippe Saurel. The ultra-inventive, ultra-light, ultra-pragmatic architecture of the late Arbre Blanc made the poetic dialogue between nature and artifice of the designers speak—in their eyes, the ideal candidate.

The alchemy was total, if one is to believe those involved, and the exercise profitable for all. Since then, multiple commissions have recently opened up in France for the architect—he opened an office directed by Marie de Franca, a young architect trained at his side in Tokyo. His partners, for their part, have gained in recognition and notoriety. And the team has reformed regularly—either jointly or in part—to present competitions, and to win them. It is currently in charge of the shared teaching building at Saclay (Oxo, Fujimoto, Laisné-Roussel, delivery scheduled for September), of the Mille Arbres project, emblematic of the Reinventing Paris program (Oxo, Fujimoto, delivery scheduled for March 2022), of the vertical village in Romainville in the framework of Inventing the Metropolis (Fujimoto, Laisné-Roussel, delivery scheduled for 2023).

Ecological Solutions

To the west of Arbre Blanc, a weakly densified and fairly green urban landscape emerges, in which the Antigone district, designed by Ricardo Bofill in the early 1980s, stands out—a composition of arches, circular piazzas, small cubes pierced with Corinthian patios, treated in the comfortable ornamental style inspired by antiquity that the Catalan architect made his signature. To the east, the building faces a roundabout crossed by the expressway leading to the sea, behind which spreads the disturbing landscape where the first of Montpellier's new Folies Architecturales emerged in 2017, a residential building with curvilinear terraces designed by British architect Farshid Moussavi.

In the heterogeneous setting, the brilliant provocation miraculously finds its place. Observe the wing of "breaking the arrogance of the tower"—the architects wanted to insert it as harmoniously as possible into the urban fabric and into the life of the city. Through the choice of its location, which respects the view of the neighboring building; by placing the entrance at street level, rather than on a platform; by reserving the ground floor for spaces open to the public (restaurant, art center); by inviting property owners and neighborhood strollers to the construction site to inscribe the broader destiny of Montpellier.

From the climate of this city, where one spends most of their time outdoors, this is what had already served as their starting point. The architects ecology benefiting the quality of life of inhabitants while resorting to relatively frugal materials. The multiplication of balconies (one for each room, for three-room apartments, but also for three-room apartments, but also for two-room apartments, four for five-room apartments) makes it possible to capture solar energy and on the other hand to provide a certain amount of space to outdoor air.

Although Arbre Blanc is situated in the realm of aesthetics at the antipodes of the era of architectural modernism, it is no less a response to its requirement of "form follows function": the form follows the function, it is the most basic of its rules. The multiplicity of balconies is fundamentally optimistic: the idea is, for the future, to facilitate the integration of sunlight in the height of summer, when the sun is high in the sky, and to welcome it with open arms in winter, when it declines.

The phenomenon of wind acceleration in contact with high-rise cities, these new elements make it possible to let rainwater flow to the interior of the neighboring network, then to the courtyards of the ground floors, which are used to water the garden. The shadows cast by the balconies and pergolas prevent direct light from entering the apartments in summer, and despite the large bay windows that ensure that in winter, one watches the sun go chat. Although Arbre Blanc is situated, aesthetically speaking, at the antipodes of the era of architectural modernism, it is no less a response to its requirement of "form follows function".