Caserne Masséna occupies an entire city block in the 13th arrondissement, between Place d’Italie and the Bibliothèque nationale. Built in the 1970s, it embodies Parisian institutional brutalism at its most uncompromising: board-formed concrete, massive cantilevers, and sculptural volumes serving a strictly functional program.

The complex mixes scales — residential tower, fire station, suspended walkways — in an interplay of mass and void typical of slab urbanism. The facades alternate modular grids with plastic gestures: the curved signage band, the ground-floor colonnade, projecting loggias. Black and white reveals the raw texture of concrete and the cast shadows that color would have flattened.