Halles Alstom Development, Nantes – Franklin Azzi Architecture
The Halles Alstom development in Nantes, France by Franklin Azzi Architecture is designed to become a cultural centre that will enforce 20 years of innovative thinking about urban living within the city. The large site will benefit from a design that respects the local history, building on a rich heritage in order to become a cultural icon within itself.
“The new step taken in the transformation of the Isle of Nantes goes beyond simple rehabilitation. It comes to town to town together on the site of the old halls Alstom. A city in the service of creative ambition, a great urban project that builds on 20 years of cultural innovation and experimentation to bring out a new line of development at the crossroads of culture, technology and economy.
The Isle of Nantes is the opportunity that the city has decided to be seized to provide the urban heart of a metropolis of international standing. Once a symbol of its decline, it became one of its renewal. Like the Island project, it is by this project to establish a renewal that requires an approach at once radical and respectful of the past with our project has already there, s’ press the intrinsic qualities of the halls, the genius loci, to achieve and carry out this ambitious transformation. A pragmatic and remarkably This project is not written on a blank page, so we have a privileged process simple for a complex program.
Without formal nostalgia, and promoting an economy of means and action, we consider the demolition strictly necessary for the use and enhancement of existing as a step towards the transformation of the old halls Alstom in future School of Fine Arts in Nantes Métropole . This bias, away from architectural formalism, enables sustained investment in the future use of the school and beyond, this new neighborhood. Halls, made in three groups, are open, re-organized and re-connected to participate in urban cohesion, identity support programs, promote living together on a human scale. Architecturally, the modularity, the ability to ownership and the relevance of space and equipment quality are central to the thinking that governed the project according to scope, time, actors, needs and programmatic constraints , ecological or social can occur. Halls need to know to adequately respond today and adapt without difficulties tomorrow.
The difficulty of this complex project is not in the design of an architecture over, but in the production of a tool “extraordinary” that sustainability lies in its ability to transform, s’inachever. economy of means, quality use (s) and locations are flexible in our view, the foundations of a sustainable project. This work subtraction first, then building, fully coherent with the economic and ecological constraints, and leads us to propose a project to: – be part of the urban”, Franklin Azzi Architecture
