This is not the firm's first project in the area; in 2009 it delivered a corner building marking the new Cours de l'Ile Seguin (the structuring axis of the Zac du Trapeze, leading to the Pont Renault, linking Boulogne-Billancourt to its island). With Citylights, the design response, which could at first appear minimalist, proposes a luminous landmark for one of the most ambitious programs in the service sector of the Western Paris area.
On a second reading, the project imposes a dialectic intelligence paired with its formal power. Dialectic because the project recovers the virtues of an architecture too easily put down and creates critical connections with the new city, which is rapidly taking shape among the the city's industrial vestiges.
Dominique Perrault preserves and completes the existing devices to establish Citylights in the geographic reality of a transforming territory.
Surrounding spotlights serve as a beacon to Paris and its outskirts, introducing the new limits of the city and inviting the Seine River and its banks, the hillsides of Sèvres, Meudon and Suresnes and their terraced constructions to take part in the inexhaustible display of the city.
Like a control tower dominating Boulogne, Citylights illustrates the current urban transformations underway on the metropolitan scale.