Oct 26, 2004 - "A building dedicated to automotive creativity" is how Robert Peugeot, head of Innovation and Quality, described the new PSA Design Centre during the official opening on October 7.

The building may go down in architectural history, Jacques Ripault is not new to automotive work – he assisted in the renovation of Renault's Boulogne factory, and he has designed a big Valeo plant – but there are more art centres in his portfolio and he has won numerous coveted architectural awards.

This new Peugeot-Citroën building is situated in Velizy, a small town just outside of Paris, not much more than a big supermarket and a huge freeway-intersection, as well as a military flying field which makes it impossible for snoopers to fly over and photograph prototypes when they are displayed in open-air on the rooftop viewing area.

The clever PSA-people also asked James Turrell to participate, and this American lighting artist has made the big building into some kind of 'Aurora Borealis' during the dark hours. Differently coloured lights produce hundreds of different facades, and have suddenly transformed Velizy into more than a traffic crossing. 27 months in construction and 130 million Euros have put Velizy on the architectural/cultural map.

The Design Centre is much more than a design studio too. With 900 permanent employees (more than 300 are of the 'styling staff' representing 20 nations) and space for 200 additional temporaries. It contains not only the Peugeot and the Citroën design studios, and the group's advanced design operation, but also modelling studios, colour and trim, all kinds of digital design tools and workshops where styling scale models can be made, or 1:1 models, or see-through models or working concept cars – you even find a small production line where future production cars get their pilot workout. The whole place looks like a minor Torino. Without the good restaurants of course. They are replaced by an enormous canteen. You don't get the same good Piemontese rumors here either, come to think of it.

The tools are of course up to date, the usual CAD workstations with the latest software, digital scale modelling and graphics workstations as well as calculation and simulation applications, you also find a CAVE VR system there, a newly created HOLOBENCH - a kind of small CAVE with which you can simulate work in smaller environments – a result of upgraded Catia and cooperation with Dassault Systemes. A 'Scale 1' screen is also among the shared applications.

But the studios are not shared. Peugeot and Citroën have their studios far removed from each other (but I suppose their personell might run into each other at lunch in the shared canteen), and there seems to be remarkable differences in their working environment. Citroën's is light and airy with (it seemed) more hand sketching than on-screen work . Whereas the Peugeot studio looked like a replica of their old installation at La Garenne. "We like it that way" one designer told us.

At Peugeot Gerard Welter still rules, he has been with Peugeot design since he started at 18 years old, in 1960. Slowly he will transfer the control to his next in command, Jerome Gallix, but expect to see Welter around at least to the end of next year. And longer than that as designer, builder and entrant of his own Le Mans cars – WR they are called now – with a host of loyal Peugeot personell around him, "just off for a two week vacation" – it's incredible what this man manages to do in his spare time, incredible that he finds some spare time.

In 2000 Citroën hired young Jean-Pierre Ploué from Ford (the new Focus were among his jobs there), and before that, VW in Sitges, and before that Renault (Twingo for instance). Ploué has also got his next-in-command now, Gilles Vidal, the C4 designer. But here it seems more like a liaison function, rather than preparing someone for a take-over. Citroën designers seem like some of the happiest in Europe right now, it might mean that Ploué takes care of all boring business, and lets the designers get on with their designing.

When some of us 'opened it first', during the Designers Night at the Paris Motor Show (800 invited and uninvited guests, mostly designers, five of whom I positively know changed employer during that evening), we went to the new PSA design center in the hope of seeing something new. We saw nothing except the big presentation hall.

Now we saw everything, skillfully arranged so that nothing of any importance was shown - the C1 and the C6 have been blown so many times now that they too were displayed, under a flimsy red cover, many months before their first official release. But the biggest surprise was that we were not any longer visiting the PSA design center. Now we were at ADN – Automotive Design Network as the whole operation have been named. And it is probably no accident that the initials mean DNA in French.

But new name notwithstanding, the whole enormous building with all these people makes you wonder how soon Peugeot and Citroën will join some of their other colleagues. Most Japanese have a satellite studio in central Tokyo these days. Renault have for a long time had their downtown small Paris studio, Audi have put some of their brightest in München, only miles from the main studio in Ingolstadt, but blessedly removed from it, and VW have recently opened their new small one in Berlin, two hours drive from Wolfsburg.

I cannot see Peugeot/Citroën manage cutting edge thinking and designing in an environment more like a laboratory/workshop that a creative pool. Shall we give them two years before we see their first shadow studios too?