2019 award WINNERS EDITION

Except perhaps the 17th century mansion, the serie of constructions now hosting the Lodève Museum was hard to decipher. Projectiles uses the contrasts of raw material to unite the different periods of construction: binding them together both symbolically and structurally. Doubling the surface area, this rehabilitation-extension translates, through a logic of outcropping and connections, a sensitive dialogue between heritage and contemporary writing.  In doing so, it opens the way to another urbanity. This project provides the city of Lodève with a common ground as well as a common base, embodied by a new forecourt that brings the museum out of its invisibility. The precision, the clarity of the intervention, the commitment of the project managers and the enthusiasm of the project owner allowed this metamorphosis, offering another vision of the museumand its collections.

The choice of « material » is central in the act of building and crucial for sustainable strategies. And it is sometimes chosen for its ability to disappear and blend into an environment and landscape. Such is the ambition carried by the Georges Clemenceau’s house Visitors Reception. As a foreword to Clemenceau’s interior universe, TITAN’s architects have returned to the simplicity of the character and the beauty of the coastline that was so dear to him. They translated into a discreet monolithic longère hidden in the dune, whose double skin alternates smooth and sandblasted concrete. Remarkable by its implementation, the gradation of the concrete from the darkest to the lightest fades into the landscape, fixing the memory of a great man in front of an even greater landscape, inscribing the material in the natural cycle of the elements.

How to work better? What porosities between disciplines, what improbable encounters can be created to generate positive externalities and add value to our productions? The Best Productive Place Award seeks to transcend the open space paradigm. With its dome and triangular houses, the Frans Masereel Cultural Center is a fascinating universe built in 1972 by Lou Jansen in the Flemish countryside. To conceive the project, LIST continued the art center’s inaugural wish to break out of the negative connotation of the factory. They built an extension welcoming graphic workshops, a darkroom and new exhibition spaces for the machines exhibition. Neutrality here is not formal, it is expressed in the balance of various practices, between art and architecture, between showing and doing, working and contemplating.

This building also proves that working better means working in BIM, a tool that has enabled the project’s architects, engineers and craftsmen to jointly develop this spectacular self-supporting framework.

Faced with the might of this military architecture of the base, the team deployed an exemplary soft power in its ability to connect to other cultural projects, through its strategy and its ability to activate spaces. But this project is remarkable for its induces narration, its materials and colors, its very playful drawing and its roughness. This project installs a continuous back-and-forh from the auditorium to the surrounding harbour, from detail to a larger image. It becomes symptomatic of an enlarged architecture abolishing borders and temporalities, a real urban catalyst re-establishing non-elitist places.

Project owner: City of Saint-Nazaire, Sonadev

Architect : 51n4e (BE), Bourbouze & Graindorge