Engineering AgroTechParis Brand-New Campus

Engineering 37,000m² of flexible, cross-disciplinary space in a world-leading life sciences cluster.

Location

Palaiseau, Essonne, France

Client

AgroParisTech/INRAE

Project Status

Due to complete 2022

AgroTechParis is one of France’s most prestigious higher-education institutions and a leader in life sciences and agronomy. WSP has been supporting the next phase of its evolution, as it relocates to a brand-new 65,000m² campus in the world-leading cluster of Paris-Saclay.

Paris-Saclay is a government-designated special planning district established in the southern suburbs of Paris in 2013. The ambition is to create an innovation hub to rival Cambridge, Massachusetts or Silicon Valley, bringing together six of France’s “grandes écoles” alongside public and private research institutes, commercial partners and start-ups. By 2027, it is expected to host 20,000 academics, more than 25,000 students and 20,000 employees.

Photo banner & above credit: Marc Mimram Architecture

The AgroTechParis site will be shared with the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), whose specialists are currently spread across several sites in the Paris region. Designed by Marc Mimram and Jean-Baptiste Lacoudre and built by Vinci Construction France, the new campus will consist of eight buildings. The most eye-catching is The Forum, which welcomes visitors into a giant, climatically controlled greenhouse, as well as five buildings dedicated to teaching and administration, and two large research facilities, all set round a covered garden. When complete, the site will provide space for 3,650 students and staff, including 37,000m² of state-of-the-art laboratories.

Photo credit: Marc Mimram Architecture

WSP France was appointed in 2017 to provide technical project management and building services engineering. The team took a multidisciplinary approach – vital on such complex teaching and research spaces, which will contain advanced technologies and secure, isolated spaces for research. The whole project was designed using building information modelling (BIM), with the different partners sharing and collaborating on the model in real time. Crucial to the building services design was the ambition that the large floorplates should be as flexible as possible, able to accommodate different layouts to suit a wide variety of occupiers, from agroecology, biology and modelling to the humanities and social sciences, with the emphasis on reducing the barriers between them. The campus is set to be occupied from the start of the 2022 academic year.