We are attached to the small things, to the search for the moving and the essential, for vitality. In our architectural projects, it is the daily and cyclical experience of the place that reveals the spatial qualities we seek: conviviality, fluidity, clarity of plan, simplicity of materials and assemblies. We believe that the time lends itself to an affordable architecture (in all senses of the word), to an architecture of proximity anchored in a context of daily life.
By placing the human being and his perception of space at the center of our concerns, we try to create places of durability and poetry, which resist the heavy tendency to consider architecture as a disposable consumer good. The Cammac Music Center is the bearer of this resistance. Through its mission, the center becomes a place of encounter, of discovery and exchange, of continuity. The very structure of your organization carries this desire to pool, to listen and to share, in simplicity. A first visit to the site, under the snow, already allows us to perceive the "community spirit" that inhabits the place. The pavilion layout of the buildings, facing the lake, creates a set of sub-spaces with defined characteristics. The opening onto the lake, the clearing, the corridor, the square, are all images that emerge from the discovery of the site and these visions will nourish and articulate the layout.
The Cammac Music Centre project, which consists of consolidating the installations through a major intervention on the main building, will have to draw inspiration from the elements present. The materiality envisaged in the development of the building will have to be inscribed in continuity, so as to perpetuate the warm and rustic atmosphere that emanates from the existing buildings. To do this it is essential to consider the project as a craftsman's work and to take the necessary time to dissect the existing, to evaluate its potential; conservation, restoration, dismantling, recovery ... For the moment, the lack of information on the state of the existing building does not allow for an informed decision, but the essential point is the intrinsic quality of the place. The adopted party will be the optimal answer between the needs, the state of the place and the means, but the whole work will be inscribed in an approach of continuation, a work of remaking.
The notions of sustainable development, green architecture, and building performance are concepts that are an integral part of our project approach. The need to approach the project with a broadened sensitivity to these notions has become a reflex, an automatism in our practice (even if it often goes against certain technocratic wills). The project must be designed in such a way as to take advantage of the elements; sun, light, prevailing wind, orientation, in such a way as to optimize the yield by minimizing the "mechanics". This sensitivity is not limited to the built environment but spreads and organizes, through the plant and mineral construction, the entire site.
Even if the program has a certain complexity, the heart of the Cammac Music Center is composed of two elements: the site and the hall (concert hall, gathering place, meeting place, exchange place, learning place, celebration place). One of the primary concerns of the project is to create this unifying element, this moment that leads to create, to exchange and to provoke its fusion to the site and to the whole building. This relationship must be true, intimate. Moreover the idea of the inhabited (of the room, of the house) comes to enrich the attachment to the site, the anchoring, the belonging.
We are aware that building remains an act that inscribes continuity, that installs the community, in this sense, our approach and our concerns are carrying the urgency. Urgency to become aware of our time, of what it generates, to think of the legacy that our acts will constitute. We are responsible.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury noted the appropriateness of the architectural approach and the quality of the siting, in particular by preserving the building's siting as well as the east-west positioning of its extension and the orientation of the bedroom wing. The location of the concert hall in the heart of the building, the simplicity of the volumetric response of the whole project and the economy of means in relation to the objectives of the programming constitute the main qualities of the project.
The planning, the richness, the versatility and the quality of the different interior and exterior spaces consolidate the idea of a musical center. The layout of the interior and exterior spaces, the clarity of the spatial distribution and the flexibility of the various possible uses, the appropriateness of the project in relation to the program and the needs, the relevance of the construction and the realism of the project in terms of its implementation, the great clarity, the intelligibility of the spatial organization and the rigor of the planning complete the list of attributes of this project.
(From ARQ magazine, # 125, p. 17)
(Unofficial automated translation)
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