Project Name: Middle School Cafeteria in Gonesse

Location: Gonesse, France

Design Team: MARS Architectes

Total Floor Area: 1646 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Charly Broyez

Design Features: MARS Architectes has completed a new school cafeteria for the Philippe Auguste Middle School in Gonesse, a northern suburb of Paris, delivering a quiet yet architecturally precise intervention that redefines how institutional dining spaces can feel. Rather than treating the cafeteria as a utilitarian afterthought, the architects conceived it as an independent building, a deliberate act of spatial generosity within a campus built in the late 1970s. By relocating the dining function into a new extension, the studio simultaneously freed the original structure for additional classrooms and gave students something rare: a purposefully calm environment carved out of the rhythm of the school day.

The scheme is composed of three interlocking volumes clad in slightly reflective aluminum panels beneath a standing seam steel roof with a zinc-like finish, a restrained material palette that lends the building an understated civic presence. A 32-metre concrete canopy with a flowing organic profile traces the path of arrival, folding seating and landscape into a single sheltered gesture. Inside, the dining hall stretches 55 metres in length, opening generously eastward through floor-to-ceiling glazing onto a dense planted garden. This green buffer softens and filters natural light, creating an atmosphere of deliberate withdrawal from playground noise and generating an almost physiological shift in spatial experience.

In this project, landscape is not decoration but structure. A sequence of planted atmospheres guides students through arrival, dining, and departure, making the natural environment an active participant in the architecture. The 340-square-metre kitchen, positioned along the service road for efficient delivery access, enables full on-site meal preparation, a practical decision with significant implications for the daily experience of both students and staff.

Design Team: Founded in 2012 by architects Julien Broussart, Raphael Renard, and Sylvain Rety, MARS Architectes is a Paris-based practice whose work spans residential, cultural, educational, sports, commercial, and heritage renovation typologies. Rather than operating from a fixed formal language, the practice frames each commission as a critical inquiry, engaging not only with geographical site conditions but equally with the cultural and temporal dimensions of place. The underlying ambition is not architectural camouflage but poetic revelation: an architecture that surfaces and amplifies the inherent qualities of its context.

This intellectual rigour has earned the studio sustained recognition across the profession. MARS Architectes received the AJAP distinction in 2014, was laureate of the Equerre d'Argent in 2021 in the Habitat category, and was awarded the Prix Delarue by the Academie d'Architecture in 2022, a prize reserved for young practices of exceptional talent. The studio has been nominated for the EU Mies van der Rohe Award and recognised multiple times as an ArchDaily Building of the Year finalist, cementing its position as one of France's most compelling emerging architectural voices.

The lead team is currently helmed by Julien Broussart, Raphael Renard, and Sylvain Rety, with design contributions from Manon Teillet and Nuno Morais. The practice deliberately maintains a selective project volume to ensure that each commission receives the undivided attention of its principal architects throughout the design and delivery process, sustaining a rigorous, place-responsive methodology consistently applied across all typologies and scales.