The program of the Regional Museum includes two categories of functions: the "public" ones such as the exhibition halls, the animation rooms, the café... and the "private" ones such as the offices, the storerooms, the workshops... The private functions will be located in a new building since the 1921 building can barely contain the public functions. The Museum is gradually revealed to the visitor: first, the 1921 building occupies the entire visual field; then the visitor sees the aerial passage, a sort of "penstock" that connects the 1921 building to the new building, which is inscribed in nature like a memory that slowly emerges from the ground (the archaeology of memory). The land, laid out in layers, will allow the establishment of places of discovery of the regional landscape [...]. From the "parvis", the granite wall of the new building constitutes the interface with the 1921. On the outside, the Museum asserts its presence in dialogue with the 1921 building.
Once inside the 1921, the discovery of the Museum is gradual. In the imposing stone and steel nave, the visitor perceives the permanent interpretation exhibition and then discovers the other components, including the exhibition rooms housed in a vast ovoid cylinder, both affirmative and fluid, a case where memory comes to life, where memories come alive. Here the volume marks the time, a contemporary intervention in a heritage site. A volumetry that clears the object of collection (the 1921 building) and allows an abundance of light in the public circulations. In order to successfully install the exhibition rooms, we loosened the concrete stranglehold of the mezzanines, so that visitors could circulate at ease around the elliptical plan, up to the Villeneuve space. [...].
(From specialized magazine)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury was not convinced by the approach of this project and more specifically by the insertion of a museum function in a historic building without an approach imbued with respect and humility towards it. The proposal artificially recreates a formal language already present on the site that blends dubiously with the 1921 building. The insertion of elliptical exhibition rooms inside the 1921 building remains a bold gesture inside a building with heritage value since it requires the dismantling of the mezzanines while the effectiveness of the form has not been convincingly demonstrated. The provision of water basins between the buildings serves a symbolic concept more than a budgetary reality.
(From specialized magazine)
(Unofficial automated translation)
