04_Second project presentation

The bookshop has been added on the other side of the corridor connecting the entrance to the exhibition room. This room and the conference room have different floor cladding to show to the visitor that they are not part of the visit. At the same time their wall related to the corridor or fully glass wich invite the visitor to make a stop in their path to the exhibition. Some intermiediate space have also been added between the differents part of the program. It make the transition between them more clear and replace the simple door by a true transition system.

The height of the skylight have change, they are between 2 and 3 meters. People can't go in from the public space anymore. They became full circles in the public space as they are still not full one in the museum so that people can still go in or see through.

About the entrance, I made a tiny narrow space to have the minimal impact on the public space, hide it a little from the view, and create the contrast between this space and the wide entrance hall that is just after.

The nature of the skylight elements have change. They are higher to avoid people to look inside and have a bigger impact on their movement in the public space. They also create now visual barrier, wich allow to recreate the contrast atmosphere of the square, creating narrow or wider spaces. Some of those elements can also be connected to a second circle wich create a bench around. Those brick furniture allow people to do more than just go around the elements but also to stay on the place.

03_First project presentation

   As we saw in the site analysis, the square is all about contrast. It goes from narrow spaces to wide spaces, from noisy ones to quiet ones, etc.. The existing museum is also interesting. This building talk about interiority. With its huge interior courtyard and its garden. The garden in the existing museum is an untouchable thing surrounded by wall, which cut the visitor from the rest of the city. The museum, as the all city, also talk about the utilization of a material, which is brick. Combining the characteristics of the square and those of the museum, I decided to make a building that takes the main characteristics of the museum but also contrast with it. So the extension is underground in contrast with the existing one, it expose contemporary instead of classic art, as a modern garden instead of a baroque one, use new ways of building with brick, ...

   The project takes place in front of the Sainte Cecile cathedral. To avoid it to be hide by the extension we decided to build it under the ground. 

 It’s a sequence of diferent spaces lighted by skylight. The exhibition room is a big space in which some elements invite the visitor to move, and to discover the different pieces exposed. More than just making inviting people to move around those elements also contains pieces of art which are lighted by skylight.

They also raise above the ground and affect the public space inviting one more time the people to move around, look through, sit on it,.. 

The round light coming from their pure geometry evolve during the day and the geometry it goes to. A bigger hole in the center of this room is a garden where people can look at some sculpture with a brick and vegetal background.

This wall uses new ways of assembly bricks which allow light to go through it. The utilisation of this kind of assembly is also part of the contrast with the existing museum. The same materials are used but in a very different way

02_idea & concept

In order to talk about the concept it was important to look at the connections at the site. Firstly we needed to find the right size and volume for our building. In the scheme we show our process of thinking, we started out with showing the borders and the maximum space we could use. The maximum for us, was defined by borders of the square in the floorplan and by the height of the cathedral size wise. Then we started to cut the volume down slowly to find the right position and size. We lowered the maximum height considering we do not want to make competition to the majesty of cathedral, we want to preserve the monumental feeling. Next we cut the volume in size from the west side of the square since we wanted to leave some free space infront of the apsid not to change its look and perceiving. Reason to cut the volume from the east came up when we looked through historical plans and analysed them. We could clearly see, that the big open space on front of the apsid is quite new, and there was always block of buildings leaving only small square area for the market. We choose to follow this axis and leave the market square empty. In the end we cut the volume to the final form to a narrow rectangle, to preserve the free space in front of the cathedral and also to preserve the relationships between streets. This way we can add value to both squares.

When working with such historic area, we needed to agree on our opinion how to work with it and in it. One thing we realised was, that heritage area is very untouchable for us. We do not want to change it. It was quite interesting thought for us, that there is a metaphore in how similar this is comparing with nature. Both worlds very untouchable and beautiful.

We were very interested in this topic, and looking for inspiration, we found a very special kind of art. The best known artist in this kind of art is Richard Serra. The concept of his art is to put large scale statues into spaces in order to change the perceiving of the space.

 Then we thought about how can we use this concept in urban space. We found multiple references of small or big objects used in the urban space to change its perceiving and atmosphere.

We thought about how we can implement this into the square. The idea started with what happens if we put for example a wall in the middle of the square. How does it change the perceibing of the square and space. With a simple scheme we show, that the difference between perceiving before and after putting the wall is huge. Especially talking about the cathedral, which is the main point of interest when looking at the square. Suddenly the cathedral can not be seen copletly and clearly and you wonder, what is behind the wall? also the small opening changes the flow of the square, people have to go around or as a mass through the opening. A very small structure/object changing the perceiving of a very well known scene largly. 

So the remaining question was, how can we do this with our volume? To apply the concept, but use our building as the object. Clearly the volume was too big. It would change the place too much which was not our goal. We put the building underground, which reduces the volume and use small parts of the building peeking throught the surface. The parts visible will act as our statues to change the perceiving of the space. Visible parts are skylights bringing the light to the gallery and they leave a small footprints and hints of our building on the surface.

When looking at the sections, there is a connection between the square and the underground building made by skylights. The two areas overlap by changing level of the ground. The entrance we located from the courtyard of the Toullouse-Lautrec museum to preserve the connection with museum since it is an extension. It provides easy access from one exhibition building to another.

In the cross section it is shown that we create a different atmosphere in the gallery space. Last time we talked about the difference between the atmospheres inside the cathedral and outside at the square. Now we created another atmosphere, in our eyes somehow similar to the cathedral atmosphere. They share this kind of sacre quite atmosphere.

When thinking about the functions and programme of the building, we needed to find the relationships between each of the spaces. In this scheme we show what the relationships look like to us, how they connect.

We started to think about the order of the functions and how to make the layout in the building. In order to find the right layout we put the functions next to each other and looked at the proportions they represent. Next we prosposed multiple options of the combinations, but we agreed the final option will be chosen individually in further process.