Hugues Fontenas Architectes Collection Centre for the museums of Poitiers

client

City of Poitiers

architect

Hugues Fontenas

assistant architects

Laure Lienard, Benjamin Herr, Thomas David.

engineering

C&E Ingénierie (structure), Éléments (mechanics + environment), Infra Services, Frédérique Vincent (conservation).

cost surveyor

BMF

site coordinator

Secoba

floor area

2 330 m²

building cost

4 717 000 € HT

calendar

2016-2019

program

Storage facility for the collections of the museums of the City of Poitiers. Restoration workshops, photography studio, study room, administrative offices.

architectural design

Two parallel low buildings, characterized by long sloping sloping roofs.
The largest volume houses the transit activity for the collections and all the storage facilities along central circulation illuminated by skylights emerging on the roof.
The smaller volume houses restoration workshops, management or conservation offices.
The buildings are made of a double contrasting envelope: outside, a light cladding of aluminum sheets with irregular ribs running along the slopes and descending to the ground ; inside a massive concrete construction providing shelter for the collections and workshops.
Each building responds to a specific climate design providing thermal and hygrometric stability.

competition images

Kaupunki

photographs

Benoît Fougeirol

Exceeding expectations
Develop each project following a re-evaluation of both programme and anticipated results. Reply beyond the expectations of the programme. The principal architectural objective is to be found in the research of added, unexpected qualities.

Evolving surfaces
Architecture to be also conceived as terrains to be occupied in the future by still uncertain or improbable uses. Architecture as “reverse ruins” in an upturned archaeology that facilitates or suggests inevitable transformations. Therefore, when it might be tempting to be just spectacular, never hesitate to be simple and complex.

Comforts
Pay particular attention to all the complexity factors – functional, technical, regulatory, economic, aesthetic – and use them as a basis for future comforts. Distinguish structures, enclosures or equipment to consider temporal aspects of the project in a prospect of reversibility and diversity of uses.

Artificiality
Advocate and assert the profound artificiality, the non-naturalness of architecture. Conceive architecture in a grey ecology without naivety and in creative phase with the contradictions of our environment.

Aspirations
Associate production and research in resonance with an analysis of actual facts. Remain independent in thought to stimulate, guide and increase the pertinence of a project. Propose reality as an aspiration to do differently.

Founded in 2006, the office has developed its activity mainly in the field of cultural facilities with a strong interest and expertise in programmes related to the exhibition and preservation of all types of collections, from archaeology to contemporary art. Hugues Fontenas also teaches and conducts research on themes strongly connected to work in the office.