Cultural Center
The Gisors Cultural Hub occupies a site that had long remained on the margins of the town centre. Once reclaimed land, it had become an expanse of surface parking — both an urban barrier and a break in the landscape. Beneath the ground lay contaminated soil, extensive remains of pre-war industrial infrastructure, a high groundwater table, and flood-prone terrain.
The project emerges directly from these conditions. Rather than erasing the site’s constraints, it embraces them, transforming them into the foundation for a new urban geography.
The ambition of the Cultural Hub extends far beyond that of a public building. It acts as a catalyst for reconnecting and revealing the city and its wider territory. The project stitches together previously fragmented urban elements: the Town Hall square and its neighbouring civic buildings, the historic centre and the open countryside, the commercial high street and the banks of the Epte River. It restores continuity where discontinuity had long prevailed.
The site regains its landscape depth. The Epte River, once hidden and disconnected from the town, re-emerges as a defining element of the project. Views towards the church, the post-war reconstruction buildings, and the existing urban fabric are uncovered, reframed, and integrated into a sequence of movement.
Rather than standing as an autonomous object, the architecture is conceived as a journey — a carefully choreographed promenade that reveals relationships within the city that had previously gone unnoticed.
The project also draws upon Gisors’ architectural history, where water and gallery structures have long been intertwined. The covered gallery of the fifteenth-century washhouse reflected a productive and domestic relationship with water. Later, the Town Hall’s monumental gallery and stair, built during the post-war reconstruction, staged a more symbolic dialogue between architecture and landscape.
The Cultural Hub extends this lineage through a new gallery: a promenade overlooking the Epte, where water becomes a setting for contemplation, recreation, and collective life.
The project is composed of three complementary elements: the park, the media library, and the cinema. These are linked by a long gallery running east to west across the site. More than a circulation route, this linear space functions as a permanent threshold — between town and countryside, architecture and landscape, river and housing, the quiet interior of the library and the immersive atmosphere of the cinema. The gallery creates continuity, encourages permeability, and frames a succession of carefully composed views.
The park occupies the heart of the composition. Land once dedicated to cars is transformed into an accessible public landscape, open to the river and crossed by everyday movement. Here, the project turns one of the site’s greatest constraints into an opportunity: the need to retain substantial parking capacity within a flood-risk zone. Parking is accommodated beneath the buildings, within an infrastructure designed to withstand periodic flooding. This strategy frees the ground plane for public life and restores it to the landscape.
The entire architectural ensemble is united by a shared material language. A warm, pale, stone-textured concrete establishes continuity with the mineral tones of Gisors — the church, the Town Hall, and the post-war reconstruction architecture. Metal elements and joinery with subtle golden reflections introduce a finer, more luminous quality that changes with the light.
Inside, the two principal buildings deliberately offer contrasting atmospheres. The cinema embraces the imagery of the dark auditorium: deep reds, matte black finishes, restrained lighting, and a sense of depth and intensity. The media library, by contrast, seeks calm and openness. Natural light is soft and pervasive, washing over tactile materials including smooth concrete, pale timber, golden metal, and light-coloured textiles.
The programmes themselves remain flexible and adaptable: the cinema can be converted into a performance venue, while the media library accommodates exhibitions, lectures, and a music studio.
Since its opening, the Cultural Hub has become a major destination for both the town and the surrounding region. Attendance at the cinema and media library has significantly exceeded expectations, but the project’s greatest success lies in the spontaneous appropriation of its outdoor spaces. The park and gallery have become everyday places for walking, recreation, and social interaction, animated by a wide range of users.
Residents of the neighbouring retirement home once again stroll along the river; groups of secondary school students gather in the public spaces after classes; local people pause, meet, and spend time there. Biodiversity has also rapidly returned to the riverbanks and newly planted landscapes, restoring a living ecological presence to a site that had long been heavily artificialised.
The Gisors Cultural Hub does not seek to become a monumental landmark. Instead, it builds relationships — between programmes, landscapes, temporalities, and urban fragments that had long been disconnected. It is an architecture of movement rather than objecthood, attentive to continuity, transitional spaces, and the enduring presence of the landscape.
