Reception Pavilion for a Sawmill
Program : construction of a reception pavilion for a sawmill.
Handover : 2017.
Floor surface area : 140 m².
Mission : complete.
Structural engineering : Artofact (La Rochelle).
HVAC engineering : Area Etudes (Nantes).
The program of the building consisted in the creation of a reception area, management offices, and a locker room and a resting room for the workers of the sawmill.
The architects saw in this project a real opportunity to bypass the conventional ways of building production and construction, and to implemente instead a short material supply and production circuit.
The reception pavilion is built mainly from the wooden material that is already available on site. As little transformation and transportation as possible was needed to make it.
The constructive principle relies on a rafter framework and raw trunks used as posts.The implementation is made easy as it consists of the assembly of simple elements that are piled and struted the one to the others. The assemblies are dry mechanical fixings.
Thus the workers of the sawmill could participate in the transformation and assembly of the different elements. A possible future disassembly will also be easy.
The short material supply circuit took place on two different scales. The first one was the scale of the sawmill, which naturally offered a stock of raw material to make use of. A large inventory was made by the staff of the sawmill to establish a precise list of the wood available on site.
The second scale of material supply took place in a radius of 50 kilometers around the town of Corzé, where some opportunities to find wooden material lacking on site where to be found.
As for the other construction elements (glass, ironwork, …) local enterprises and materials where also used, as much as possible.
The simple construction system implies that the sequoia cladding and covering panels have variable sizes. Indeed, they were made from different raw materials. The layout of the cladding and covering panels was optimal, to avoid waste.
The cypresses of the posts were salvaged from La Bohalle, and were used as they were, with very little transformation.
As for the layout, the architects aimed at making it as flexible as possible. We imagined a free and supple design, all the serving spaces being placed along the northern façade.
