EUmies Awards 2015

The objectives of this project are three fold. One, to make available to the public the third most important collection of experimental architecture in the world. Second, to create a strong contemporary entry signal to the museum. Third, to create a “sense” of the experimental work to be discovered within the site.

The entire site determines the surface of the intervention. We identified two predominate structural grids emanating from the historic buildings on the site. The meeting and the convergence of these two geometries materialises in a deformation, a convergence, a zone of turbulence, the future presence of the FRAC Centre, the first center for experimental architecture in France.

A new inner court is created as a public space, linking all the buildings and program of the FRAC. Our intention is to make not only a landscape but a topographic surface. This surface follows the interferences of the two building grids and accommodates the natural slopes of the site leading towards the entries of the different building programs.

New volumes created by the meeting of these geometries are extruded vertically and stretch over the court and toward the city. They are “tri-partite” in nature and conceived to be simple and facetted in form and open to the sky, a language derived from the fusion of these same site grids.

These “turbulent” extrusions each contain an element of the program: the first and tallest a temporary exhibition gallery with its accompanying scenographic spaces, the second an audiovisual gallery and the third, a welcome area and bookshop. These new volumes create a place of meeting and exchange, their combined spaces ultimately form an ambulatory space that then leads the public to the temporary and permanent exhibition spaces within the existing historic military barrack buildings.
The exterior facade conveys a perpetually modifying flow of digital information by the artist Electronic Shadow. The idea here is to create a building which continually describes the process of architectural creation. Volume, surface and line fuse together to create a dynamic, interactive and continually changing presence, ultimately the de-materialization of Architecture into a signal of light.

Some of the innovations are as follows: The use of an existing architectural geometry and history to “emerge” a new language from this. The use of an “Auto formant” structural method to create the new entry volumes. An innovative digital façade, creating a veritable ”internet generated Architecture of light” – a dematerialized Architecture.