Recasting a Historic Building as Living Material: The Renovation of the Paris Chamber of Notaries

SPACE July 2025 (No. 692) 

interview David Dottelonde, Wandrille Marchais co-principals, Atelier Senzu × Lee Sowoon​

Lee Sowoon (Lee): Originally designed in 1855 by architect Charles Rohault de Fleury, the building of the Paris Chamber of Notaries was recently renovated following an international competition. What motivated your design approach to this historic structure?

David Dottelonde (Dottelonde): What drew us in was the depth of the challenge: to give new life to a building steeped in history without turning it into a nostalgic replica. We saw this project as a chance to defend a position that’s central to our practice—that of architecture as a tool for long-term regeneration. Competing against major national and international firms, we entered the competition with the clarity that we had something different to offer: not a style, but a scenario. It was informed by a narrative rooted in the building’s material and symbolic reality, yet also anchored by the pressing environmental and social questions of our time.

Wandrille Marchais (Marchais): We approached this project as outsiders, but with the conviction that architecture can and must speak the language of transformation. We were not there to restore an image, but to recompose a structure capable of expressing relevance and endurance in 2025 and in 2095.

Lee: What was the overall design direction proposed by the Paris Chamber of Notaries, as the commissioner behind the design competition?

Marchais: The brief was structured yet remarkably open. The Chamber expressed four major ambitions: to create a ‘house of notaries’ open and welcoming to its members; to reconnect with the public; to embody the evolving identity of the profession; and to enhance a neglected heritage site. However, these goals were never reduced to prescriptive architectural gestures.

Dottelonde: While the client’s expectations were clear in terms of programmatic shifts – more flexibility, reversibility, and visibility – the design direction remained to be invented. We did not treat the brief as a list of requirements but as a potential narrative arc. We proposed to make the notariat visible at work, through space, light, and sequence.

Façade revealing traces of the dismantled mezzanine.​

Lee: The building has undergone several partial renovations in the 170 years since its completion. Was there a particular element of the building’s past that inspired your approach to this reconstruction?

Marchais: At ground level, we drew from the building’s initial porosity with the city. Its nineteenth-century function included cafés and shops. That civic quality inspired our reopening of the façade—not to recreate the past, but to reintroduce transparency and exchange. 

Dottelonde: The building was remarkably innovative in 1855: it featured metal structures, gas lighting, forced-air heating, even early forms of raised floors. This spirit of architectural and technical experimentation is inspirational. We extended the avant-garde lineage of the building into the twenty-first century—with curved structural glass façades, invisible technical systems, and a commitment to reversible assemblies.

Marchais: We considered the building’s original condition not as a model, but as a reference—one layer among others. Since 1855, it underwent major shifts: façades altered, mezzanines added, courtyards infilled with concrete. Each change reflected a shift in function or context. But taken together, these interventions created a visual and spatial incoherence. Our role was to disentangle the layers—not to eliminate them, but to give them structure and logic again.

Lee: The semicircular courtyard of the original building complemented the asymmetrical site while clearly defining the ‘servant spaces’ in the north and the ‘served spaces’ in the south. How did this functional north-south division serve as a reference point in your project?

Marchais: This north-south polarity inspired our entire intervention. To the south, we restored a ceremonial spatiality: generous volumes, historical details, layered perspectives. To the north, we embraced adaptability: modularity, acoustic comfort, technical efficiency. The spatial separation between public and private is not just functional—it’s symbolic. The grand staircase offers a glimpse into the life of the Chamber without violating confidentiality. It is not about exposing secrets but about offering transparency with respect—a scenography of professionalism.

Dottelonde: The monumental staircase at the heart of the building became a central figure in our spatial strategy. More than a circulation device, it acts as a theatrical threshold—separating yet revealing. As one ascends, the spatial language shifts subtly, and the visitor becomes aware of the working world of the notaries, visible through carefully framed openings. We wanted to choreograph a spatial narrative in which the profession is no longer hidden behind walls but subtly displayed, at work—dignified, precise, alive.

Ground floor lobby. Stone dismantled from the façade was reprocessed on site and incorporated into the floor pattern.​

Lee: What changes were involved in transforming the southern area on the ground floor into a fully open public space?

Marchais: Our main aim was to restore dignity and clarity to the entrance sequence. The existing mezzanine, added later in the building’s history, had diminished the lobby’s scale and stripped it of its role as a place of arrival and representation. By removing it, we re-established a hall that is both generous in height and luminous—a space finally aligned with the symbolic stature of the Chamber of Notaries. This hall is not only functional, it is civic. It sets the tone for the entire building.

Dottelonde: We wanted to offer a new urban generosity. Reopening the façade and revealing the slab line was not about aesthetic nostalgia but about transparency and dialogue. The street sees into the building again. From the hall, you perceive the garden, a rare gesture in this dense urban fabric. And within the entrance space, we integrated an exhibition area: a place where the public can learn about the role and evolution of notaries, their connection to public life, and their transformation.

Lee: Despite the strong visual presence of the newly inserted curved glass façade, the project seems to extend the building’s original context rather than introduce a new one, while addressing functional shortcomings. How did you determine your criteria when intervening in an existing context?

Dottelonde: Our approach to intervention is anchored in use. We transform only what must be transformed—when space no longer serves, when clarity is lost, when light is missing. The curved glass façade is not an exterior statement, but an interior resolution. It opens the courtyard, maximises natural light, and offers collaborators real visual and climatic comfort. We didn’t design it to be seen from the street, we designed it to be lived from within. That’s how we define intervention: not through stylistic contrast or heritage reverence, but through the benefits for use.

Marchais: We’re not interested in preservation for its own sake, nor in rupture as a manifesto. We believe in precision. This façade’s curvature is calibrated to the geometry of the courtyard. Its transparency is both symbolic and functional—it brings air, clarity, and dignity to workspaces that had been neglected. When a gesture changes life inside the building it becomes legitimate, regardless of whether it is visible from the street or not.

Lee: In the process of dismantling the ground-floor façade, some of the elements were reused in reconstruction. Beyond material care or preserving traces of the past, what architectural attitude informed this act of reuse?

Marchais: This project was an opportunity to demonstrate that reuse is not a constraint to overcome, it can become architecture in itself. We reclaimed stone fragments from the demolished façades and reintegrated them into the new floor of the entrance, not as decorative relics but as fragments of a living memory. We also reused pozzolana, a porous volcanic stone originally found in Haussmannian slabs, to ensure continuity with the existing material structure. For us, these gestures are not about quoting the past but composing with it. For us, the essence of design is to find the right material for the right place. We don’t fetishise matter, we compose with it. Each material carries a logic of use, of assembly, and of end-of-life. At the project Grand palais, for instance, we’ve been working with this duality: materials from the biosphere, like raw earth, and from the technosphere, like recycled aluminum. This approach is directly inspired by Cradle to Cradle (2002). We now know how to control, or at least anticipate, the entire life cycle of what we build. That knowledge is a design tool.

Dottelonde: We strongly believe that reuse can now be considered a form of authorship. Too often it’s reduced to a form of clever salvage or anecdotal transformation. We see it as a generative act—a starting point for design, not an add-on. In this project, we also introduced ceramics and clay, echoing the building’s artisanal past when a ceramicist had a studio here. This wasn’t about storytelling alone. It was about composing a new palette of materials – tactile, narrative, and resilient – within the constraints of our time: limited resources, carbon budgets, the need for reversibility. We believe every material must be projected into its future. Will it last? Will it age well? Can it be disassembled and reused? These questions shape our design choices as much as aesthetics or structure. In this project, reusing historic stone wasn’t symbolic, it was functional and precise. Materiality is never decorative, it is the first line of the project’s resilience.

Lee: Lastly, with respect to your stance on ‘regeneration’ of already-existing things, what new urban architectural values did this project generate?

Marchais: This project is part of a broader reflection we lead within Atelier Senzu: how can architecture contribute to building a desirable future under constraints? For us, regeneration is not a nostalgic act, but a projection. The Chamber of Notaries became the testing ground for an architecture that is both grounded and visionary—one that accepts limits as conditions for invention. We see buildings not as objects to fix, but as narratives to continue. This project demonstrates that civic institutions can evolve without losing their identity, and that reuse, far from being a fallback solution, can produce new forms of beauty and meaning.

Dottelonde: We don’t build utopias, we build hypotheses. Each project is a fragment of the future we want to inhabit. Here, we anchored that vision in the specific realities of our time: climate urgency, material scarcity, institutional openness. We believe architecture must now anticipate its own obsolescence. That means designing not just for the present, but for reversibility, reparability, and reappropriation. In that sense, this building is no longer a monument. It is a resource, open to reinterpretation— like the future itself.