The building is located in a contemporary suburban environment characteristic of the contours of our urban areas: diffuse and difficult to read. However, the place is well inhabited and the urban stakes are high.
The elements of the programme are being shaped with equal attention: an office building and an outdoor car park, forming a functional unit welded to the existing one. Yet here, without being monotonous, the architecture is unified by its abstract, massive and readable regularity. The surface parking, continuous and gross, is designed with the same frankness. Planted with wisdom and precision, 100 trees provide an unexpected landscape like an urban clearing.
The interior spaces operate a fusion between urban space and architecture. At the heart of the building is an atrium designed in all its dimensions, punctuated and federating the internal organization.
Two types of spaces are dedicated to the two temporalities of use: those intended for work, intimate and comfortable and those conducive to meeting and strolling. However, there is no clear dividing line between them in a concern for the fluidity so much sought after in new ways of working. The transparencies between the inside and the outside, those arranged in particular in front of the "third places", offer a skilful dialogue between the tertiary activity and the urban environment. A new urban character is sown by a resolutely "in-situ" architecture.
The CFE headquarters is a bioclimatic building. The building has a custom-made and uniquely designed facade. The prefabricated breathable envelope consists of two opening glass skins made of wood on the inside and aluminium on the outside. Connected to sensors, it is managed by an automated opening/closing and cloaking system. The facade coupled with the atrium allows natural ventilation in summer, spring and autumn. Heating and cooling are provided by low-temperature underfloor heating systems powered by geothermal energy on a 70-metre deep groundwater table. The whole system is coupled to a heat pump. The construction is of a passive type.