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Architects: BARAKI
- Area: 240 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Matthieu Croizier
Text description provided by the architects. Built in the late 1980s, the Gruyère rest area was designed in the spirit of post-modernism, reconfiguring vernacular materials and architectural elements to form a complex of several buildings, including the public toilets building, which is the subject of this conversion. The existing building has a masonry base, mainly made with reinforced concrete, with a facing of local river pebbles visible from the outside. A glued-laminated timber frame forms a 2-slope roof. This triangular volume is laterally offset, creating a covered square in front of the entrance to the toilet blocks. To support the loads, four oblique beams are extended to the ground, providing impressive views of Lac de Gruyère and the Fribourg Pre-Alps.
The client wanted to renovate the outdated sanitary facilities and eliminate the internal circulation, in favor of direct access from the covered square to self-contained WC cubicles. The priority was ease of maintenance and improved comfort and safety. The client allowed freedom of expression and architectural integration without specification. Architecture isn't necessarily reserved for large-scale complexes, buildings of public importance, and representations. The Baraki practice is interested in the experience of everyday life, taking a break at a motorway service area, and in secular infrastructure aediculae. After all, these spaces and constructions are frequented by everyone. We pass through them, and we stay there, without realizing the time and space we occupy. This subject is at the heart of several infrastructure projects within the office. Can a public toilet become a landscape observatory?
The large mirrored surface in polished stainless steel, which hides the joints between the doors of the WC cubicles in its reflective surface, gives the impression of an infinite extension of the landscape opposite. It avoids the question of adding a new range of materials to a context already full of architectural references and forms. The stainless steel is camouflaged, and the plan becomes abstract and invisible. The asphalt floor follows the paths and roads in the surrounding area, and the linear LEDs in the ceiling blend into the existing sandblasted cladding. What remains is the view and an airy feeling. The mirror gives the illusion of an 8-support structure that restores symmetry to the off-axis structure. This effect plays with the asymmetry of the existing building.
Passing through the doors, you enter a complete stainless steel space, like a clean, modern, automatic space capsule, served by a service corridor at the back reserved for maintenance staff. The complexity of such a simple gesture remains hidden. At the front, a series of urban furniture designed in collaboration with Elie Fazel and Valentin Sieber invites you to stay and rest. Seating elements, tables, and coat racks, made entirely of sheet metal and stainless steel tubing, are grafted onto prefabricated concrete 'City Blocks' road modules. A new space for contemplation and an architectural quality emerges from a previously unnoticed location.
