Designed by Dominique Coulon & Associés, the new Pierre Bottero media library and public park has been created from a historic “Hôtel particulier” originally built in 1642.
Located in Pélissanne, an ancient fortified city in the heart of Provence, France, the project shifts between two eras and two dimensions: the verticality of the rehabilitated volume of the existing building and the horizontality of the extension. This dialogue is embodied in the contrast between the apparent homogeneity of the facades and the different shades of local materials used, such as ocher and Rognes stone.
The classical spatial structure of interconnecting rooms was preserved in the existing building, which establishes a simple internal organization of the media library. The extension, meanwhile, displays large, flexible consultation spaces on two floors. The ground level opens widely into the park and allows visitors to immerse themselves in the landscape. The upper level offers a different atmosphere as it propels the visitor into the crown of a plane tree. Preservation efforts guided the curved shape of the extension.
An adjacent building connects the town hall square and the park has been renovated into a passage that links different poles within a global and open urban system. The passage is materialized here by a totally empty space bathed in natural light. The existing floors, doors, and windows were removed and the tiles on the roof were replaced with glass tiles.
The park facade was maintained as is with its semi-circular porte-cochere. On the town hall side, the facade is open over its entire width, framing the park.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Community college’s hillside learning center
The Earl E. and Dorothy J. Dellinger Learning Resource Center at Southwest Virginia Community College in Richlands, Va., is the centerpiece of this mountainside school. Designed by Arlington, Va.-based The Lukmire Partnership, the 50,000-sf, two-story building connects the upper and lower campuses, which are separated by a 70-foot vertical grade change.
| Aug 11, 2010
BIG beats out Foster and Hadid in design competition for Kazakhstan's National Library
Invited as one of five pre-selected architect-led teams that included Lord Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid, Copenhagen-based BIG was awarded first prize in an international design competition for the new National Library in Astana, Kazakhstan. The 33,000-square-meter facility will be organized as a “circular loop of knowledge” that allows for clear, intuitive orientation of the vast co...
| Aug 11, 2010
Modest recession for education construction
Construction spending for education expanded modestly but steadily through March, while at the same time growth for other institutional construction had stalled earlier in 2009. Education spending is now at or near the peak for this building cycle. The value of education starts is off 9% year-to-date compared to 2008.
| Aug 11, 2010
Concrete Solutions
About five or six years ago, officials at the University of California at Berkeley came to the conclusion that they needed to build a proper home for the university's collection of 900,000 rare Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books and materials. East Asian studies is an important curriculum at Berkeley, with more than 70 scholars teaching some 200 courses devoted to the topic, and Berkeley's pro...
Cultural Facilities | Aug 11, 2010
12 major trends in library design
Many academic planners assumed that the coming of the Internet would lead to the decline of the library as we know it. To the contrary, many academic libraries have experienced significantly increased patron use in recent years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Let There Be Daylight
The new public library in Champaign, Ill., is drawing 2,100 patrons a day, up from 1,600 in 2007. The 122,600-sf facility, which opened in January 2008, certainly benefits from amenities that the old 40,000-sf library didn't have—electronic check-in and check-out, new computers, an onsite coffeehouse.
| Aug 11, 2010
Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design
When tasked with transforming an early 1920s Italian Renaissance bank building into a fully functional library for the Rhode Island School of Design, the Building Team for RISD's Fleet Library found itself at odds with the project's two main goals. On the one hand, the team would have to carefully restore and preserve the historic charm and ornate architectural details of the landmark space, d...
