Cultural Centre in Bourg-la-Reine / Dominique Coulon & associés

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Text description provided by the architects.The Cultural Centre inBourg-la-Reinelies on a narrow plot right next to a high embankment upon which a regional trainline runs. This plot is L-shaped and leads out onto a small road hidden away. To build a public centre, such a plot seemed far from ideal. So building an edifice on this plot called for a design with which the structure could stand out as a public building and find a legitimate place between the vegetation-covered embankment and the neighbouring homes.For us, a programme as rich and as quality-oriented as this one had to find spatial expression worthy of it. So we paid particular attention to the quality of the collective spaces. In doing so, we placed the building's entrance hall in the curve of the road so that the edifice's two sections, following the plot's shape, would join in an open space that would encourage encounters while offering views of the adjacent vegetation through glazing.The open spaces implicitly join the different rooms together to make them relate to each other better. The strangeness of the plot's geometry prompted us to create an arrangement of oblique forms and folds that intertwine. The spaces interweave into each other and the elevations reflect this. Inside, a vast open space expands through three levels of the building, multiplying double heights, viewpoints, walkways and suspended spaces. This unifying area is like a point of reference at the heart of the project. The hall's triple height captures sunlight, in spite of the embankment. It offers large-framed vistas of the sky and trees from its hallways, its upstairs walkways and its first-floor meet-up space.The watchword in this programme was connection. Indeed, we had to relate many spaces with highly varied purposes to each other. These spaces included a 250-seater theatre and its dressing rooms, two dance studios, rooms devoted to languages and music, an exhibition space, rooms for adolescents and activities for parents and children, workshops for stringed instruments and visual arts, a learning kitchen, a bar and, lastly, an administrative hub.The scale of the windows across the facade give the building its public edifice status. These windows create hollows in the limestone structure and put the project's spatial and programmatic wealth on display. The huge windows reveal the programme's generosity and suggest a project bathed in natural light and embellished with vegetation, crisscrossing views and unique atmospheres.