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Siège Orange Guinée

Construction of the new ORANGE headquarters in Guinea, a flexible building for a scalable company.

Located in the heart of the growing Koloma business district, the project aims to transform the site into a central hub for Orange’s influence. The challenge was to design an iconic, high-quality, and unique architecture while respecting the social and environmental issues present in Guinea.

The project includes reception areas, a conference hall, a company restaurant, a fitness room, and fully flexible office spaces.

The overall volume consists of two wings connected by a central section. A series of exterior walkways reinforce the link between the two built volumes. At the center, a shaded patio is accessible from all levels via various pathways: corridors, terraces, and footbridges.

Client : Orange

Location : Conakry, Guinea

Size : 18 000 m²

Status : In Progress

Key points

Flexible offices.
Conference rooms.
Covered parking.

Download the project sheet

The architectural design focuses on high-quality landscaping across the entire site: an elegant architecture, volumes that serve the workspaces, total flexibility of office floors, and solar protection for interior spaces.

Design Intentions – Conceptual Approach

Workspaces

The central part of the project houses the main core, which includes vertical circulation, technical areas, sanitary blocks, and all common spaces: lounge-coffee area, reprographics, archives, and large meeting rooms. The exterior walkways create a true connection and facilitate movement between the two wings of the building. They are present on every floor. Footbridges located at the ends of the wings further strengthen the connection between each part of the building. Present on every other level, they give life to an inhabited patio, creating both functional and aesthetic dynamics within the project.

Office Floors

The office floors offer complete flexibility and freedom in the layout of the various spaces. Benefiting from natural daylight, the organizational scheme defined by the architectural concept is simple and efficient. Open spaces, such as collective office areas, are located on the inner side of the wings, with direct access to the walkways. More enclosed spaces, such as meeting rooms, are distributed along the outer edges of the wings. This layout allows for maximum flexibility in the collective office areas, with the possibility of reconfiguring partitions according to evolving needs.

Landscape

At both the building and site scale, significant emphasis is placed on planted areas and vegetation. Greenery is present throughout the site's perimeter as well as on the building itself, at multiple levels. Planted strips form a vegetative belt at the base of both indoor and outdoor parking levels. These green spaces provide shaded areas for the entire surface parking lot.

Features and Facades

Restaurant

The company restaurant connects with other services located on the ground floor. It offers a generously landscaped outdoor area. The restaurant’s layout is designed to be functional and to facilitate its use—an essential feature for this central space in the site's daily life. The various areas are arranged to optimize circulation as much as possible, ensuring that there is no overlap between user pathways and technical flows.

Facades

A first layer of concrete—simple, raw, and elegant—is complemented by a second “filtering” skin. The facades feature fixed vertical metal fins in a pastel gold tone, giving the project a refined and balanced color palette within a context of warm, reddish hues. The distinctive and major advantage of this system lies in its effectiveness in managing daily solar gain. Positioned at a 90° angle to the façade, the fins provide protection from nearly all direct solar radiation.

A Strong Vegetative Presence

The Base

First and foremost, the project must be anchored to the ground, like a tree with its roots. This principle is embodied in the building’s base, which includes two levels of parking, surrounded by densely planted retaining walls. These allow the parking to be integrated into the terrain and create a raised forecourt above street level, protected from traffic by this buffer zone. The plantings form a true landscape that can be appreciated from the street. It consists of several layers: low ground cover and small plants, banana trees and medium-sized trees, along with a few large, mature trees.

The role of vegetation in cities, especially in hot climates, is essential for regulating heat, improving air quality, and enhancing residents' well-being.

The Fault

The base is intersected by a fault that allows the building to connect with the ground along its entire perimeter and opens the two parking levels onto a garden. At ground level, it is planted like an undergrowth with flowering tropical plants and tree ferns, creating a calming atmosphere. Meanwhile, large, fast-growing trees emerge from the forecourt slab and interact with the scale of the building. Around ten specimens of *Eucalyptus deglupta* or Rainbow Gum are planted, featuring tall, slender trunks with coppery bark that peels away to reveal colorful shades resembling flames, along with light foliage. As one passes through this fault, natural light filters in while a canopy provides shade, softening the perceived height of the building above.

The Hanging Gardens

The verticality of the architectural project is reflected in the landscape through the creation of hanging gardens located on the terraces. These gardens promote well-being for those working on-site by offering a foreground of greenery and relaxing spaces that extend the common areas. The gardens are designed as fragments of natural landscape suspended between earth and sky. The plants are selected for their ability to thrive in above-ground cultivation and in wind-exposed conditions: palm trees, bamboo, and flowering tropical plants.

Team

Patriarche (Architecture, Cost Management)
Partners:
Tas International, Groupe Projex

Credits

Program

Offices

Notre Dame de Paris

Folk’

Photos of the construction site

Siège Orange Guinée