Toulouse, France
2016
Airbus Group
Leadership University
The purpose of the Airbus Group Leadership University is to gather the Group’s top managers from all over the world in order to train them on a campus which accommodates a 150-room hotel, a restaurant, training and office spaces, and a conference and events centre for 700 people.
Client
Program
Area
Planning
Client
Immobilière Aelis
Airbus
Program
University (offices, meeting rooms, conferences), hotel (150 rooms), restaurant, event center, landscaped garden
Area
12 800 m² SDP
On a 4 ha site
Planning
Delivery
2016
Located on the vast Toulouse airport platform, beside the A380 assembly factory and the Aeroscopia Museum, the project was faced with the challenge of creating an ensemble on the same scale as the site, and above all forging the cultural identity of this international group via functional and memorable architecture.
Installed in the heart of a large rectangular plot in keeping with the site’s scale, various of the project’s functions are grouped together, symbolically, around a large 75m-diameter circle surrounded by a circular gallery. The project thus offers Airbus managers from all over the world a kind of melting-pot of a meeting-place within a showcase setting whose unique and memorable character we wanted to accentuate by creating a specific design and lighting.
The cylinder constituted by the curving façade resembles a huge sculpture, with large, twisted white strips symbolising the flow of air along the wings of an aircraft. This visual setting, designed by Boxwood and fine-tuned by VP & Green, adds an artistic dimension to the aeronautical culture of the managers who come together here. It is accentuated by Yann Kersalé’s lighting installation, which locates the site in relation to the various corners of the globe from which these managers come by creating a “galaxy” visible across the airflow-strips.
Another memorable element, the 35m-high totem tower accommodating the hotel, will be visible from the entire Toulouse Blagnac site. Architectural emotion and artistic emotion are thus mingled in this project so that in the space of a single stay here, each person absorbs and remembers his or her “Airbus home”.
Installed in the heart of a large rectangular plot in keeping with the site’s scale, various of the project’s functions are grouped together, symbolically, around a large 75m-diameter circle surrounded by a circular gallery. The project thus offers Airbus managers from all over the world a kind of melting-pot of a meeting-place within a showcase setting whose unique and memorable character we wanted to accentuate by creating a specific design and lighting.
The cylinder constituted by the curving façade resembles a huge sculpture, with large, twisted white strips symbolising the flow of air along the wings of an aircraft. This visual setting, designed by Boxwood and fine-tuned by VP & Green, adds an artistic dimension to the aeronautical culture of the managers who come together here. It is accentuated by Yann Kersalé’s lighting installation, which locates the site in relation to the various corners of the globe from which these managers come by creating a “galaxy” visible across the airflow-strips.
Another memorable element, the 35m-high totem tower accommodating the hotel, will be visible from the entire Toulouse Blagnac site. Architectural emotion and artistic emotion are thus mingled in this project so that in the space of a single stay here, each person absorbs and remembers his or her “Airbus home”.
Incity Tower