DLW architecture office
DLW architects seized the opportunity of a “hollow tooth” in the city center of Nantes to build their offices, which welcome a team of 15 persons.
The purified design of this vertical project, reveals the elegance of the structure and the power of materiality.
The DLW agency is located on Marmontel street, situated in the urban district of Madeleine-Champs de Mars, where architectures of various periods coexist. The building occupies a small plot of land of 90m2 in a diamond shape. It respects the alignment of the facades on the street and emerges between the gable stone of a hausmannien type building of the 19th century and a stone house of the 20’s.
The agency develops in a vertical way, on four levels of 65m ². On the ground floor, the bike park acts as store window, while a meeting room opens on the patio. On the 1st floor, we find the administrative pole as well as a second meeting room/material library. The last two levels work as open office spaces.
Showcasing our savoir-faire, the building expresses our approach on architecture, based on the expression of the structure, the materials and the purified drawing.
The choice of a light metallic structure and the implementation of collaborating floors provided a fast construction on a very constrained site, and limited the foundations.
A very simple, almost naked architecture is put in advance: an aluminum metallic skin, big wooden openings. Its geometrical importance is shown through the precise wedging of the volume between the existing adjoining buildings. On the inside, the different materials remain strongly present: the stone walls, the metallic structure, the concrete floors, the steel ceilings of the collaborating slabs, the wood of the partitions, all reveal an essential architecture.
The big openings create transparencies and open the building to the city.
The group “Fichtre!” created a part of the internal wooden elements, such as the staircase, the storage under the windows and the desks.
