La Seine Musicale

Abstract

La Seine Musicale is the latest project by architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. Opened to the public in April 2017, this cluster of rehearsal and representation spaces sits on the Ile Seguin a few kilometers to the west from the center of Paris, in place of the former Renault industrial plants. On behalf of the timber contractor Hess Timber along with the structural engineer SJB Kempter Fitze, Design-to-Production was responsible for the digital planning of the entire timber structure covering the main auditorium at the very tip of the island. Shigeru Ban’s signature hexagram pattern covering the egg-shaped auditorium consists of 15 horizontal ring beams interconnected by 84 Diagonals (42 in clockwise and 42 in counterclockwise direction). The entire structure fits into a bounding box of 70 m length, 45 m width and 27 m height. The beams have an average cross section of 320 × 350 mm and are subdivided into 1300 individual segments. All beams sit on the same layer and interpenetrate at crossings. The facade on top of the beam structure is composed of triangular and (almost) planar hexagonal glass panels. The interface between the curved timber structure and the straight glass edges is achieved by another 3300 CNC-fabricated timber parts. The focus of this paper is on the principle of design for manufacture and assembly, the solutions specifically developed for this project and the way workshop pre-assembly and on-site constraints have been integrated into the parametric modelling process of a complex timber structure such as the Seine Musicale auditorium.