Villard-Bonnot, France

Aragon Cultural Centre

WIMM

To achieve the renovation and extension of its unique Cultural Centre, the new public community named “Communauté de Communes du Grésivaudan” made a political step by wagering and trusting the project into the hands of a young team. This approach was intended to mark a new dynamism and a renewed image of a fragmented, cut up but nevertheless extended territory. The community administration wanted a single interface with the city, which would become its meeting point and “eye catcher”.

The project stakes revealed to be multiples and crucial. The Aragon Cultural Center is located in a «poor» community – “Communauté de Communes de Villard-Bonnot (Isère, France)”. This former worker shaped street village, was directly dependent on the development of the paper industry, now closed. Located at the base of the valley and facing north, the vegetation marks a sharp and abrupt boundary in the site, placing a strong and true setting as a background scene. It was necessary to encounter and confront political, social, historic and geographic constraint as this project had to reflect, with a modern vocabulary, the significance and potentialities of this commune. It had to create an event that called the surrounding population to its territory, by then forgotten.

The cultural complex, at the time, and although facing the City Hall, participated in the feeling of obliteration of its public emplacement and character of village centre. Too standing aside, the tension between both buildings did not manage to find equilibrium of town hub or give a feeling of public space.

The renovation of the Aragon Cultural Centre becomes a political tool, promoting local materials; supporting new conceptions; “know-how” and the employment of innovative building systems with wood and concrete in the territory.

Re-establishing its urban presence, a wooden volume gets closer to the main street, floating, uplifting its programmatic restrictions and revealing the paradoxically natural character of the site. It is added to the background stenographic site a coloured atmosphere, with the prime façade. The aim was to print in these grey environment new tones, assuming visual contrast. The assembly entrance was thought as a multitask space, seen as a people and function encounter, which was traduced and exploited in its graphic ambience. The exhibition space, strongly anchored in the landscape, linked to the main entrance of the cinema and its gathering hall, invites the visitors to participate in this “urban mise en scène”. Its perception in the site can be observed from a distance or when approaching the paths that lead the discovery of its cultural activities. Aragon Cultural Centre project responds to the necessity of connecting several urban and landscape elements. It extends the surrounding nature into its grounds, creating a new green axis that associates physically and visually the front and the back of the building. The entry and exhibitions space becomes a knot, a centre point that suggests and encourages inhabitants to explore this new landmark of the city. The park “La Clairière” constitutes a supplementary environmental entity to the building. It becomes a spring room, a reception garden or an open air cinema.

The exhibition area offers a flexible space, a «stimulator» of creation. It is placed under the rough wood volume that follows the deformations of the shape of the new movie auditorium. The frameless glazed surface, that filters the light, becomes the matrix of conception, the stage of creation, setting a unique framework for cultural, artistic and contemporary productions. The new movie auditorium assumes its wood construction proposing a contemporary reading and interpretation of traditional wood structure systems. The structure in its primary material, with its exposed beams, cocoons the screen, the multicoloured seats and the spectators. The goal was to establish a strong link between the program (film projection) and the end result space.

The choice of a constructive procedure that privileges the prefabrication off site, of the main timber structure and the rectilinear elements which composes de sheathed surfaces of the façades, allowed the rationalization of the project construction and its cost. The principle was to connect the old cinema to a new part, plugging in the structure in the existing concrete building.

The several studies conducted and the choice to construct a building that respects and anticipates environmental policies like RT 2010, drove the setting up of several systems that allowed the well use of energies. For a sustainable development it was installed a double air flow recovery ventilation system combined with a geothermal heat pump, that assures a sustained energetic control.

Europaconcorsi Beta

Aragon Cultural Centre