L'ArtChipel. Meurchin's New Multicultural Center
Multicultural facility for media center, dance school, music school and multi-functional room.
Meurchin's new multicultural center takes place on an extremely narrow plot of the city central square, where the town hall, the schools, the village hall, posts office and, in the background, St. Peter's Church are grouped.
The project seeks to fit on a site that wasn’t - the building occupies the place of a vegetated embankment along a cemetery wall - in a context of both a traditional square in the city center, but also unusual, with the terrain’s dimensions and its special relationship with the church and the cemetery.
The project consists of three simple and sober volumes that interact with the surrounding buildings.
The glazed volume hosts the Media: it is the showcase of this new equipment. This transparent volume reveals in the background a garden from which emerges the St. Peter's Church.
A second volume, opaque, is off-center from the first to mark the entrance to the facility and open a perspective, a view of the countryside in the background. It receives the multi-functional room at the southern end of the building.
A third volume is higher; it plays with the transept of the church and drives the rear garden. It hosts upstairs functions related to the music school.
The management strategy will allow the three entities (library, dance school, music school) to be clearly identified in one building while enjoying access, operations, organizations and managements of clean, separate, optimized and pooled.
