The search for a dialectic between industrial architecture – also a constituent of the site’s identity – and contemporary architecture is the basis of the architectural intentions for the Lyon Confluence district. The Ybrid tower is the first ambassador of this renewal. The building’s exoskeleton borrows the vocabulary of the concrete floor arches present on the existing structures, evidence of the site’s industrial past.

The concrete exoskeleton forms the load-bearing façades of the structures and surrounds the wooden framework that makes up the interior elements of the building.

The issue here is to reflect the city by working on the scale of the whole block rather than simply the building. The project proposes a mixed-use block open to the district: the ground floors comprise an active podium that connects the life of the block to the daily life of the district. The central garden becomes an extension of public space through various physical and visual openings. Prominence is given to usages and imbrication of programs, in order to create a place with high communal value: housing, offices, activities and facilities are implanted in the buildings and reflect an idea based on the joint notions of thresholds, temporalities and the mutability of space.