School restaurant
Building the new school restaurant in Saint-Léger-sur-Dheune means building the place where the children of the village and surrounding areas will spend the most relaxing time of their day.
This building was conceived such as a house where it is nice to take refuge when it is cold and the fog rises from the Dheune. But it’s not a house like any other. It would be possible to recognize it like a public building. Its form is legible, this new building stands out, visibly different to the neighboring public building.
Inside, the different spaces are a succession of entities having own shapes and uses: the hall, the large room, the upper room, the kitchens, the service rooms. The common rooms are distinguished by their 4-sided roof which ends at the ridge with an oculus. The perception of the volume of each roof gives a feeling of unity and specific identity to each space.
In plan, these rooms are offset from each other so as to create a diagonal view which offers a sensation of depth within the same spatial continuum.
This swaying makes it possible to create different views of the exterior: some on the access path to the North, others on the square and towards the mall to the East or even to the West on a small patio. Thus, at every hour of the day, the sun generously illuminates the space; this direct light being further reinforced by the oculus which captures the South and illuminates the space above.
The wooden cladding of the interior walls and slopes gently reflects natural light, thus spreading a feeling of warmth and comfort to the occupants of the rooms. The sound of rooms is important, as in every place where people gather. In order to ensure good comfort, it is necessary to control the reverberation effect, which is why the wooden coverings of the ramps were designed as a system of openwork slats with an acoustic foam background absorbing high frequency sounds. The vertical coverings, in solid panels, constitute a flexible surface which reacts to low frequencies.
The building is designed with a structural frame of concrete with tile infill. We chose to use an element
that is regularly found along the Dheune canal: the tile wall. The proximity of local tile factories, notably the Perrusson tile factory in Écuisse (1860) and the Grande Tuilerie de Bourgogne de Montchanin (1858), provided mechanical tiles as a cost-efficient material, in large quantities.
The southern fence of the plot of the new building is thus built with a tile wall. This unusual and yet characteristic assemblage of the surrounding area is a theme that we chose to develop to demonstrate the identity of the building. On the basis of a reinforced concrete structure, a mechanical tile facing was added, sandwiched between concrete posts. The tile used, is a recycled tile found in a village about twenty kilometers away on another construction site. The tile was sawed on site to reduce its width and therefore the thickness of the facing. The layout was conceived using several dry prototypes.
Terracotta is also logically used for the covering of 3 of the 4 buildings. Each building has its own volume and roof (slope shape). On the slightly elevated site, the town of Saint-Léger appears like a landscape of roofs. The general geometry of the building and its roofs fits into this landscape, seeking a form of continuity, with traditional buildings.
Two types of tiles were used: a small, traditional flat tile with a variety of colors and an orange diamond- shaped mechanical tile for roofs with the gentlest slopes. These two types of tiles respond to the diversity of existing roof tiles in the village.
The tile is used as a structural element for roofing (flat tile and mechanical tile) and as a finishing facing element for facade wall cladding.
For the facade facings, the tile was cut and then assembled according to a studied layout, alternating the direction of installation of the tile to create a recurring pattern on all the panels. The facing is made in the form of a panel taken between engaged posts of the concrete façade wall. The sails were cast in place with a negative (wooden mannequin) defining the areas receiving the facing. The tiles were then mortared, colored to match the concrete.
A third terracotta element was constructed as a translucent wall in the entrance hall. This wall was made using the previously sawn cellular bricks, through which air and light can pass.
