3-8 Installation by Leopold Banchini & Laure Jaffuel in Paris

Earlier this year, Swiss architect Leopold Banchini installed a permanent educational space in one of the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition rooms in Paris. Dubbed 3-8, the installation is designed to host dialogues between art and industries, including workshops and lectures.

Referencing office culture, seventies utopian projects, and some of Banchini’s previous works done in collaboration with Daniel Zamarbide as Bureau (like this fantastic concrete house we recently featured on Yellowtrace), 3-8 offers a space where all teaching tools are hidden underneath the floor.

Created in collaboration with French designer and art director Laure Jaffuel, 3-8 champions 600 x 600 mm technical raised floors covered in synthetic carpet and ubiquitous grey colour used in office interiors around the world. The concept is spiced with ideas borrowed from speculative projects from the seventies like The Continuous Monument by Superstudio.

The square-shaped tiles open up to reveal different activities and various objects hidden underneath. There’s an underfloor kitchen complete with a sink and storage space, along with a rail to hang cups and pans. A different large area of the floor can be raised to reveal a seating space embedded in the floor (hello conversation pit), lit with a wavy neon red light.

Other sections of the floor can be lifted to reveal a long workshop table with stools, an auditorium with desks and benches, a garden, a cloakroom, video-conference area with flat screen, an inflatable room for power-napping and so on. Regardless of the function, multitasking is the name of the game, with the floor becoming a chair and a table, offering multiple references within an austere, minimal space.

Without a doubt, the undisputed hero of Banchini and Jaffuel’s hidden workplace installation is the humble raised office floor, which the Swiss architect feels is underused and underrated. “Although it is functional, all the situations it creates are unexpected and absurd,” says Banchini. “There is beauty in the rigour and efficiency of these materials, but they have been hijacked.”

3-8 not only questions the alienating nature of work environments, the project also suggests new radical usages and encourages freeing our preconceived ideas associated with the professional realm. That’s my kind of jam right there.