Les Simonettes
Competition-Winning Visualizations for ChartierDalix and TVK
Competition-winning design
The designer duo ChartierDalix and TVK have been announced as the winners of the urban design competition of the mixed-use development, launched by Altarea Cogedim.
The French architectural project created a new public realm in the northern district of Champigny-sur-Marne and was designed to give a nice gradient in functionality and sound to the residents. The factory, school, exhibition hall and residential blocks are designed on a very human scale despite its large size. It connects the many components of the new robust green public space and ensures a feeling of safety.
Masterplan for Paris
ZOA was responsible for representing the urban masterplan and this commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris through an 83-sec architectural animation and a set of impressive visualizations.
We had a constant focus on the separate buildings, functions, and green spots, producing work that is appealing for the common eye, not just natural-born architects. Some of our creations for this project are among our most successful works ever posted on social media and looking at this early evening piece, we can easily say that this is one of the best residential works of our visualization studio so far.
The whole collaboration felt like crafting beautiful design furnitures both for the architects and our studio. By the end of the project, we realized that the main message, ‘Living and Working Together’ is a perfect match for the whole development.
Depicting fifty different compositions
Our aim is always to involve the viewer, provide a warm, inviting feeling to “live there” and these renderings are the perfect example of this.
The project was started with 1000-pixel sketch-phase images, with each depicting a different composition or camera angle. Sketching became a priority in our process in recent years, and it requires half of the effort and working hours at our studio.
In this particular case a lot of artists got involved in the first phase, and ZOA ended up creating 50 individual visual pieces for ChartierDalix and TVK by rendering many compositions, weather alternatives and moods to represent the masterplan for the jury.
White renders are obsolete
The brief came in two stages from the architects. Although we joined forces in a very early phase of the masterplan, we didn’t use white renders. We never do.
Creating beautiful imagery that evokes an emotional response plays an important role in successful architectural projects. As technology advances, we are armed with the right people and the right tools to create stunningly-realistic computer-generated images even in the pre-sketch phase by using colors and materials to provide a more natural feeling than plain white boxes. Our sketches look absolutely like final versions but in low resolution.
That makes decisions easier for Clients.
Dani’s first masterplan
Huge investments—unlike small-scale plans—are different because they require special care to take every building and each space into the spotlight with the same color tones, coherent interior lights and contrast.
Although these projects are more complex, they also provide an opportunity—especially for Dani, a ZOA newcomer at that time—to experiment with unique atmospheres, from early-evening lights in one image to after-rain mood in another.
Slow, forward-moving scenes had an important role in the animation to underline the progress from noisy roads towards this calm environment.
The visuals were also reflected in this progression by gradually “freezing time” in Paris.
Project details
Location
Champigny-sur-Marne, France
Design
Team
Bence Falussy
Péter Kollár
Dániel Oláh
