Sumit Singhal Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination.
Lycée Alphonse Daudet in Tarascon, France by Christophe Gulizzi Architect
May 1st, 2011 by Sumit Singhal
The double extension of the Alphonse Daudet Lycée in Tarascon raises the question of responsibility when building on a remarkable site
– Lycée built in 1933 by Gaston Castel (Grand Prix de Rome), listed as a historical monument;
– Kilmaine barracks, site listed as a historical monument, built in 1718, by the architect Desfour.
The building operation considers the memory of the site and territorial identity as narrative elements, as an extension of its morphology.
Image Courtesy Vincent Fillon
In a site steeped in history, within a team whose role is to pass on our secular and republican values, there is no room for arrogance and pompous architectural features.
Image Courtesy Vincent Fillon
Spatial order is achieved by incorporating programmatic and contextual constraints, within a unique process of shape generation.
Wall Detail
The facades comply with the laws of barrack composition: podium, buttress, minerality, succession of sober openings, following a repetitive cutting module, in a subtle allegory of the loophole.
Exterior View
Pitted, coloured concrete, deployed over the entire construction, betrays the vanity of the artifices of architectural design and pays homage to traditional military constructions, massive, robust, sober and efficient.
Exterior View
No plastic feats or material preciosity. The buildings, armed with abstraction, turn towards the only permanent elements of the site. Only tactics, specific devices, no feigned mannerisms.
Interior View
Two considerations have given rise to the building’s design:
-one involves the status of image and its symbolic efficiency in space mastering and in crystallising intentions;
– the other concerns the secular tectonic tradition and semantic use of construction as a vector of cohesion and readability of the constructed object.
Image Courtesy Philippe Ruault
All is played out in the ambivalent perception of the buildings.
Spelled out in a singular, monolithic and mineral shape.
Their billhook fashioned geometry fulfils their silent forms, proclaiming them as a system, in perfect symbiosis with the site.
Sport Hall
How to make a building credible in an era flooded with icons, counterfeits, as in the Ventimille market?
Not in the art of cloning erected as a communications strategy.
Not by using and abusing architectural processes where conventional architectural writing is enough to belong, the implication and recognition of an egocentric cultural system void of meaning.
The architectural project is like a beautiful woman, invention keeps the flame alive.
Image Courtesy Vincent Fillon
It is commonplace to say that the building is LEB.
Nowadays, there are OCDs (obsessive compulsive disorders) in our profession, if you throw LEB at an engineering office, they will generally answer “external insulation, cladding and wood boiler”
Can you imagine the damage done by the biblical responsibilities now weighing upon the shoulders of the EOs? ?! Save our children !
Image Courtesy Vincent Fillon
Never fear, concrete still has a wonderful future ahead. “Daytime, is for everyday living things, night-time is for strange unknown things». Alphonse Daudet, Letters from my mill
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