Arts Education Centre — Loquidy School
This project — the extension and restructuring of a 16th-century building into an arts education centre — is part of a broader strategy developed upstream with a client who supported us throughout a demanding architectural approach, attentive to both heritage and contemporary uses.
Following a thorough analysis of the site, its uses, and the school’s educational and functional needs, we drew up a master plan setting out a series of interventions intended to durably improve how the site works as a whole. This operation is therefore only one component of a wider set of projects aimed at enhancing the site. It answers the need to create a space specifically dedicated to the contemporary practice of the arts.
Site and Siting Strategy
We chose to locate the centre within a 16th-century building in the historic part of the site — originally an enclosed garden, which became a school in the 20th century. This area gathers a few buildings from that period, and the project was an opportunity to enhance neglected heritage, a witness to the site’s past.
This setting — at once inspiring and calm, immediately bordering a remarkable wooded area — struck us as particularly well suited to the practice of the arts. Occupying this workshop also allows a heritage building at risk of ruin to be safeguarded and given new value. This rehabilitation treats the existing fabric as a constructive resource and preserves what would otherwise have been demolished without this conversion project.
Our approach also focuses on enhancing the landscape and strengthening biodiversity, in collaboration with atelier A.P.I. The landscape is conceived as a genuine teaching support — serving the curriculum, in particular the sciences, and the school’s E3D sustainable-development approach.
The project thus includes an ambitious programme of outdoor works, designed with the same care as the building: connecting the different spaces of the site, improving accessibility, supporting educational uses — teaching gardens, choice of plant species, creation of ecosystems for wildlife — enriching biodiversity, supplying the school canteen through vegetable plots, and, more broadly, improving quality of life for all.
Programme and Uses
The centre, on ground floor plus one storey, houses four classrooms: two music rooms in the 16th-century building and two visual-arts rooms in the new building. The rooms are split across two volumes, one room per level. The operation combines the rehabilitation and heightening of the existing structure with the new-build construction of a second volume.
The works to the manor courtyard extend this ambition: enhancement of the courtyard, a structured and gridded teaching garden, a picnic area, a tool store, a semi-covered enclosure sheltered by a timber-structure pergola for household waste, a compost bin, and a greenhouse set against the existing stone walls.
Architectural Expression
Loquidy School is a well-preserved site, made up of several buildings dedicated to secondary education and equipped with many facilities — a gymnasium, a rugby pitch, a school canteen, a workshop, and a manor. It stands on Boulevard Michelet, a major multimodal axis linking the northern ring road to the university heart of Nantes.
The two buildings dedicated to music and the visual arts nestle at the heart of a former built enclosure, bounded by stone walls and marked by a 16th-century structure, at the edge of the protected woodland.
Far from being four simple classrooms, these spaces become genuine places of observation — of rugby matches as much as of the site’s ecological life — overlooking the sports pitch and the protected woodland. They allow the school to imagine multi-programme events connected to the life of the place.
The two new structures and the manor form an “L” that redefines the enclosure once drawn by the perimeter walls and frames a wide grassed courtyard, overlooked by the workshop.
The east façade of the new building faces the protected woodland, which screens the boulevard and projects into the visual-arts rooms the shimmering movement of leaves and branches. The project thus enters into a dialogue with the trees: here timber is not a boundary but a guiding thread, the verticality of the cladding and posts echoing that of the trunks.
The two buildings overlook the sports pitch below. Their north gable ends are underlined by the horizontality of the footbridge that links them — a true belvedere prized by sports enthusiasts. To the south, the gable of the new building asserts itself through its verticality and restraint, offering only a framed view of the square and the canteen building.
The two volumes come together around a planted core whose Japanese species lend this patio an oriental calm. The new building, far from being a mere addition, made it possible to redefine the volume of the existing structure by rewriting its roof framing and to reveal its refinement, in contrast to its own stripped-back construction.
The stone base of the existing building is enhanced by an exposed-stone render that restores its lustre. On its west façade, texture, relief, and material mingle with the play of light and shadow cast by the perforations of the metal footbridge decking.
Owing to the proximity of the manor and its projection onto the south gable of the music room, two openings were made in the west stone façade: two tall, arched windows that echo the vocabulary of the existing window, with surrounds deliberately treated in board-formed then sandblasted concrete.
The west façade of the new building, for its part, conceals the plant room housing the heat pump behind open-joint cladding, ensuring sufficient air intake and exhaust.
Construction System
Rehabilitation of the 16th-Century Building
The rehabilitation of the 16th-century building, which houses the music rooms, includes the levelling of the stone walls, a concrete ring beam supporting the timber-frame walls, a new timber roof structure, and standing-seam steel roofing on a dual-pitch roof.
The ground-floor-plus-one façade is clad in Douglas fir. Openings are created in the existing stone walls with concrete surrounds. The west elevation, the arched doors and windows, and their Tuffeau-stone surrounds are restored through the removal of damaged stones and the installation of new ones. The stone walls are restored through deep cleaning and a lime exposed-stone render. External joinery is in timber.
New Building
The new building has a ground floor and gable ends in cast-in-place concrete walls clad with a timber-frame façade and timber cladding. The ground-floor-plus-one level is built with a timber-frame structure and Douglas fir cladding. The building has a timber roof structure and standing-seam steel roofing on a dual-pitch roof. External joinery is in timber.
Walkway
Each volume has its own staircase, with the two linked by a metal walkway in perforated sheet with a tubular-baluster guardrail. The footbridge is carried by timber posts on welded steel fittings, anchored in concrete foundations.
Landscape and Environmental Approach
The project enhances the neglected manor courtyard and creates an E3D station there: raised planted beds that make gardening easier, a structured educational natural space with the aesthetic of a formal French garden, a timber tool store, a timber pergola sheltering household waste, a compost bin, and a greenhouse set against the stone walls. The wildlife corridors and the stone perimeter walls are enhanced by a line of fruit trees.
In energy terms, the envelope ensures winter comfort through a high density of insulation under the roof slope, with a thermal resistance of 7.85 m².K/W. Summer comfort relies on a roof albedo controlled by a light colour, insulation offering a thermal resistance greater than or equal to 4 m².K/W, and the thermal inertia of the timber-concrete floors.
Rainwater is harvested for the sanitary facilities and for watering the green spaces. Domestic hot water and heating are provided by a heat pump, while the consumption of electrical equipment and lighting is kept under control.
The use of bio-based materials — structural and cladding timber, wood-fibre insulation, and wood-fibre acoustic linings — helps create calm spaces conducive to concentration and to artistic practice, while ensuring thermal, acoustic, and visual comfort.
