Olympic Campus: a new headquarters for the International Olympic Committee

To signify its purpose, the new IOC headquarters must express its openness, its dynamism and its ability to remain present during the passing of time. It also has to emphasize the attention given to its surroundings, the respect for the neighbours and users of the lake shore and its awareness of belonging to a landscape that is truly a national treasure.
Can the Olympic spirit, with its ideals of universality demonstrated by excellence in physical and mental performance, which require a constant renewing of knowledge, flawless and exemplary conduct, be embodied in an outdated and obsolete building ?
It certainly can’t.
The buildings that no longer fulfill their role will therefore be replaced.
To preserve the future, we need to define a principle more than to design a building.
The notion of flexibility, the only way to ensure the permanence of this place while allowing its update, is fundamental. Our first intuition is to imagine the IOC headquarters as an addition of spaces or plateaus defining an open system that could be completed in time without altering the project’s initial concept.
Without denying the magnetic and unilateral attraction of the lake that gives the frontal and panoramic set up of the esplanade, the project seeks to introduce reciprocity in the exchanges by orienting the campus functions transversely from east to west. The program is then divided into two different zones that converse with each other, the restaurant, the fitness, the future extension on the west, and the workspaces on the east. The centrality of the castle is re-established.
To create a porosity in the landscape, each side of the highway, the volumes defined by the floors will be aligned perpendicularly to the lake and offset one from another. The resulting divisional massing is in a more coherent scale with the castle and its surroundings.
The project evokes the Olympic logo, by organizing the IOC workspaces in five autonomous plateaus, hierarchically equivalent and connected to each other.
An esplanade, widely open over the site and lake shore, links all the entities of the IOC around a unitary space that marks their belonging to a campus.