Saclay campus hub

摘要

You hear the clangs of construction taking place on the Plateau de Saclay before you emerge from Orsay's leafy woods. Over the past 15 years, a campus has been mushrooming here, some 30 kilometres south of Paris, though it has been longer in the making. In his 1994 book Technopoles of the World, Manuel Castells heralded the cluster of scientific research institutions in Orsay - then the Universite Paris-Sud -as a potential French Silicon Valley. Under Nicolas Sarkozy's administration, and with €5.3 billion in state funding, the Orsay campus was expanded onto the plateau above, merging more than a dozen institutions and becoming, officially, the Universite Paris-Saclay in 2020. The campus is still growing. A winding climb from Orsay's town centre delivers visitors onto the plateau's grid of gleaming new-builds, car parks and construction sites. There are plenty of cars here - the campus is still waiting for the completion of a Metro link - but hardly any people. This changes once on the Rue Sophie Germain (named after the French 19th-century mathematician), which soon gives way to an expansive pedestrianised piazza. Towering over the square is a multi-storey edifice of concrete, glass and steel - half-frame and half-building. This is the so-called Lieu de Vie (place for life), a space where students can meet, eat, join a Zumba class or play basketball. On a weekday just before noon, it is indeed a place where life can be found: students are enjoying coffees from the ground-floor cafe, lounging in the shade of the mezzanine overhead. A food van has pulled up in front of the building and is busy getting ready for the lunchtime rush.