Four centuries have seen a multitude of additions, modifications and changes in use (as convent, weaving workshops, military hospital, architecture school). Since 1926, with the creation of the Avenue de Verdun and the extension of the Gare de l’Est station and until the fire in 1991, a number of the buildings have been mutilated or destroyed. The project accepts this heritage – of a complex that has the particularity of never having had a true original state. It endeavours to respect the legibility of the successive strata, accumulated over the course of time, and to restore a certain coherence to the buildings and insert each period of their history into a new context. This approach implies dissociating different modes of intervention, ranging from restoring historic parts (the chapel, east façade, grand staircase, etc.) to preserving certain domestic elements or traces of the successive appropriations and the creation of contemporary structures adapted to the new residential function. The new project, an international reception centre for artists in residence in Paris, offers the freedom needed to give new meaning to these spaces so filled with history.