Suburban landscapes are usually dull: factories and warehouses, with one colour that describes the whole landscape. Grey.

But what happens when a building tries to come out of the grey by giving the feeling of rising from the street and exploding in colours? Well, that’s what Emmanuel Combarel and Dominique Marrec of ECDM, two young French architects have done in this RATP bus centre in Thiais, near Orly airport in the suburbs of Paris.

The building stands like a plateau marked by an elegant texture of tiny dots that remind us of LEGO bricks, but is in actual fact a highly resistant concrete, Ductal, which is used all around it. There are some fractures in this material and that’s where the colours come out: blue, red, yellow, green contrast sharply with the monotonous grey, as ECDM explain: “We have reused the primary, rather basic colors found in the surrounding area”.

This building isn’t provocative and certainly doesn’t follow the poor architectural quality of the surrounding buildings. Could this be the way we may conceive a future requalification of suburban environments?

Photos courtesy of ECDM