By Mathilde Yence
How to include, welcome, work, celebrate, archive…or how to refresh a town hall life?
We bared the space, the functions, the furniture, and the needs, to clarify the request of the renovation, and offer new shapes from the inside: upgrade to standards, give a sustainable acoustic environment, change the way the team council work, recycling furniture, give colors and access to everyone. The users could be reconciled with this neglected public space and public service.
In close collaboration with energy engineers, we went far beyond the thermal renovation of the building. We managed to get the best balance between available budget /economics gains from maintenance cost/ users comfort, and found subsidies to promote low carbon buildings from the Region.
Photograph Didier Truffaut
The architect’s first material is your dreams, then comes reality. From dreams to reality and from reality to dreams, there is a thread between the two...
Playing with the tension of this thread is what makes spaces come alive!
Because we cross through spaces from one to another, we physically experience sequences. Spaces are made of sequences, they are never isolated.
The context of the project’s surroundings goes into the design. So the way I identify the context becomes part of my project. That’s how I begin a design, by trying to make it simple, efficient and bright.
Architects and designers play a role in transforming the global economy from a linear to a circular model.
Our designs should support a system which generates no waste or pollution, it should support spaces in the making, evolving environments.
Because we create so many buildings, we need to insist on materials that can be reused or converted again and again, developing by themselves.
We need to promote passive houses and energy-plus buildings, we need to use raw earth, green roofs, biosourced materials, natural light… all of this means circularity rather than linearity.