Espace Agnès Varda
Construction of the new municipal showers and social restaurant building in the city of Nantes, France
The new Agnès Varda space is being installed in place of the former municipal social restaurant Pierre Landais.
The objective is to organize, in the same place, various municipal social support services previously disseminated in the city: the restaurant, the baths-showers, and the offices and activity rooms linked to the city's CCAS.
In order to clarify this complex establishment project, we propose to organize discussion workshops with users and "passengers", to formalize the architectural project as close as possible to daily needs: a singular tool sparing ambivalent objectives, symbolized by the contradictory injunction to build an "open shelter".
Principles thus tend to be formulated, which will become the tutors to the development of the project:
- Three levels for three services, linked by a long open staircase glued to the street, articulating the pavement of the street with the sky above the roof to affirm the unitary and universal vocation of this third-party equipment.
- Natural lights prioritizing the spaces, frank and entire on the reception, sequenced on the landings, or filtered on the showers and treatments.
- Complementary proposals for reports specific to the urban environment, by conquering framing on the street, by hidden views, or by large terraces under pergola, in the middle of neighboring dwellings, offering an unexpected, discreet and privileged relationship.
- The use of recognizable and complementary materials: the reassuring inalterability of concrete to the domesticity of wood, implemented by prefabrication of elements whose sometimes complex assembly tells of the freedom taken, and shown possible, by the pattern of the joint.
Thought away from a daily life often suffered, the Agnès Varda space aims to be a refuge where architecture accompanies the staff in order to offer moments of rest for body and mind to the most disadvantaged.
