• PROJECT
    Court Simonne-Mathieu, Roland-Garros
  • LOCATION
    Jardin des serres d'Auteuil, Paris 16 ème
  • CLIENT
    Fédération Française de Tennis
  • PROJECT MANAGEMENT
    Marc Mimram Architecture et Ingénierie, INEX, AARTILL, AAB, VS-A
  • DATES
    2013 – 2018
  • SURFACE
    5 300 m² Stade comprenant 5000 places
  • COST
    22 M €
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When the landscape designer Michel Corajoud put forward his plan for improvements to the Roland-Garros site, his intention was to open it up, creating a link with the city. This necessitated opening up an extensive public space and the construction of a new court accommodating 5,000 visitors in the adjacent garden with botanical greenhouses built in 1898 by Jean-Camille Formigé.

Taking its inspiration from these historical hothouses, the new tennis court will be partly below ground level, surrounded by a terraced concrete platform, surmounted by a steel structure, and wrapped with botanical greenhouses designed to meet the highest technical specifications. These new greenhouses form a glass backdrop, a case within which plants from four continents can flourish. The design makes use of fragmented scales of glass, their edges arranged in two different directions. In this way the skin of the construction changes as the light alters as a result of diffraction, and vibrations are set up by the reflections on the irregular, broken up surfaces. The steel of the glasshouses gives rhythm to the whole, echoing the balanced structure of the terraces that rise up to the gallery running around the top of the building.