The Bordelais of the King Kong workshop, prime contractors of a new station in Vitry-sur-Seine

In three decades, the four partners of the King Kong workshop built housing, cultural equipment, hotels, offices, in Bordeaux, the city where they live and where they got to know each other, on the benches of the Archi school, as well as everywhere in France. But they had never built a station before. It is true that a station does not leave the ground every day.

Theirs has taken time, which is not unusual in a (very) large -scale project, in this case the Grand Paris Express (GPE), this network of four new automatic metro lines which will extend over 200 kilometers, all around the capital. The commissioning is scheduled between 2024 and 2031 but the Bordeaux agency station, located in Vitry-sur-Seine, one of the 68 that the GPE has, should host its first visitors at the end of the year, twelve years after King Kong had won the competition.

It was in partnership with the System design office that King Kong set his paw in an international project, almost becoming the only provincial agency to win a lot. The “stations” package was also divided into several lots. In that of King Kong, there were very large sizes, like Valode and Pistre., Thomas Richez and Anma. “A bit like Parcoursup, everyone had expressed their wish for the station location and everyone obtained satisfaction, starting with us who wanted to work in Vitry-sur-Seine”, explains Frédéric Neau, more specially in charge of the project.

As in a cave

Vitry station hits numerous huts popular with architects. It is first in the city center, at the foot of old accommodation dedicated to demolition, from the town hall, the museum of contemporary art or the Jean-Vilar theater. It is in connection with a major axis of the town, where a tram line already circulates. It is finally deployed under a park, that of the hill, 30 meters deep. Only the entrance to the station is visible on the surface, undulation of white concrete, which extends the slope of the land, and pierced with oculus, thanks to which the basement receives the light of the day, and in which trees will be planted, the whole plateau to be covered with earth.

Once in the station, with services and shops, the traveler sinks underground by a succession of escalators. Nothing unusual in a metro. If it is only the architects of King Kong have chosen, thanks to their partnership with the plastic artist Abdelkader Benchamma, to give a parietal appearance to the walls of the station. These are adorned with drawings with ocher, brown and bluish reflections. The time to go down or go up, the user will forget that he must take his metro, to go to work or to a medical appointment, and will imagine himself in the bowels of a cave at the time of Neanderthal, contrasts with the modernity of the Grand Paris Express which is not to displease the quartet. King Kong made himself famous at the top of a skyscraper, hope that being 30 meters under the ground will earn him the same notoriety.