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Architects: Heintz-Kehr architectes
- Area: 742 m²
- Year: 2013
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Photographs:Philippe Ruault
Text description provided by the architects. The project is a social and cultural community centre, opened for a wide range of users from 3yrs old children to elderly people. The object questions the passer-by, but also the architectural environment, and its history by inviting Biagio Rossetti and Giulio Romano in its materiality and Bugnato-like embossed design inherited from the Italian Baroque.
The envelope is made of a deep mat black structural concrete. Opacity, minerality , thickness, are all questions / answers to a hardcore postmodern context , and the formal and chromatic hypertrophy linked to it.
Taking aesthetic and technical risk that reintroduces the question of pattern and figure is also an archaic way to affirm the public character of the building. The project rethinks the inertia of heavy facades, mineral and opaque, almost antic.
At the complete opposite of the glued and petrochimical external insulation typologies (sustainability ?), smooth and featureless as all the new buildings that surround the projects. Black diamond-shapes create a kinetic, graphic and sensual entity.
The colored counter-points revisit the idea of polychromatic cavities within the masses of a heavy facade. They are only 4 major elements of composition, the input (orange), the loggia (green) the canopy (blue) and the breakthrough (yellow).
These colors, typical of the Rhine port aesthetics, extend inside the building in a three-dimensional layout : soffits, surfaces and vertical planes, highlighted by the transparency of the patio around which are organized the various programmatic entities, smoothly organizing the flows and the children's games.