Cher CCI Campus
An act of remembrance
The architecture of the Cher Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) retains the memory of the former Lahitolle Barracks and its exactingly laid-out site plan of long industrial buildings with strictly ordered facades crenelated with saw-tooth roofs. Today, only a few traces of the buildings and the street layout remain, most prominently the former armoury adjacent to the project, which has been refurbished to become a law school. The Cher CCI Campus thus espouses pre-existing geometries. Like the barracks’ historical constructions, the new structure is a strict parallelepiped, whose facades aligned with the former armoury and saw-tooth roofs illuminating the atrium extend the geometry of the site. Its stone and concrete plinths continue the mineral quality of the materials, and the colours of its joinery and metalwork blend with the existing ones. The hyper-rationality of the demolished military-industrial buildings is now embodied in the ribbon windows that give the programme its flexibility. These openings benefit from a complete sun and weather protection system. Architecture here becomes an act of remembrance.
An atrium at the heart of the campus
The forecourt extends the Place de Gribeauval, which is aligned with the former armoury. It has been covered to better welcome users and lead them into the atrium around which the programme is organised. The atrium is illuminated from above by the saw-tooth roofs. This is a place for people to meet and interact, and it has been designed to foster serendipity. On the ground floor, it grants access to the auditorium, a multi-purpose room, kitchen-cafeteria, and offices for students and administrators. On the upper floors, the learning spaces, work booths, and a small library are arranged on the mezzanine that looks out onto the atrium’s triple-height space. They are accessed by a double staircase with large, window-filled landings that let in the natural light and provide views to the exterior, making the building easier to navigate. The atrium is the beating heart of the campus, around which the life of this establishment unfolds.
Towards a bioclimatic architecture
The atrium is also the campus’ lung. The natural ventilation created by the openings in the saw-tooth roofs coupled with the ceiling fans cool the space in summer and retain heat in winter, thereby increasing its thermal inertia. Windows open onto the building’s various rooms and reveal its many activities, providing natural light to the horizontal circulation areas. By letting natural light enter the space, regulating the circulation of hot air in the winter and cool air in the summer without any need for technically complex, energy-intensive systems, the building benefits from natural gains that constitute its first steps towards a bioclimatic architecture.
An exoskeleton for maintenance and climate control
The facades are protected from the weather and excessive sun exposure by maintenance walkways fitted with adjustable sunshades. While users can operate them directly from the rooms, their position away from the windows on the maintenance walkways emphasises their role as climate regulators and encourages the use of the interior blinds to adjust the lighting comfort according to people’s individual needs. The maintenance walkways facilitate window cleaning and allow for sliding frames of considerable size. This allows any user to open windows widely for ventilation without disrupting any activities being conducted within the space. Although everything appears governed by a sense of efficiency and strict geometry, the users, the clouds, and the movement of the sun bring countless variations to these constantly changing facades.
Economical, low-carbon design for an architecture of the necessary
These common-sense systems are based on a construction that combines economy and low-carbon design. The concrete column-and-slab structure ensures the building’s thermal inertia. It was prefabricated as much as possible to save time – and therefore money – and pared down to the bare minimum to keep its carbon footprint as low as possible. The prefabricated facades are framed and clad in wood, as is the exoskeleton structure protecting the building, including both the maintenance walkways and the canopy covering the forecourt. Everything has been scaled down to the bare minimum without ever compromising on formal ambitions: it is an architecture of the necessary.
Flexibility for a truly sustainable architecture
To anticipate the inevitable changes in use in the future and to prevent the architecture from becoming outdated, the building’s floors are free of columns and beam drops, and they are supplied with air through corridors and walkways and with electricity via the facades. Freed from all technical constraints, the partitioning is thus governed solely by the 1.8 m window grid. This allows for a broad range of programme possibilities. The neutrality of the warm white and grey tones of the interiors encourages user appropriation and completes this intended flexibility, which is the main guarantee of a truly sustainable architecture.
For a “magical pragmatism”
While rooted in a sense of history, the architecture of the Cher CCI Campus embraces the pursuit of progress that defines our contemporary era: achieving more in the way of comfort, flexibility, versatility, and beauty with less, in terms of carbon, materials, money, and time. This architecture strives for an absolute pragmatism that takes into account:
- a necessary regulatory framework for motivating economic actors that is all too often obscure and rigid, and which can lead to absurd solutions;
- a construction environment in which skilled labour is scarce and expensive due to prevailing wages and working conditions, resulting in a loss of a collective sense of purpose that makes co-construction difficult, if not impossible;
- an industrialised approach, which is proving the only way to respond effectively to ubiquitous regulations and the skilled labour shortage; this requires a catalogue-style design, to which we nevertheless strive to give meaning. To ensure, quality, precision, and speed of implementation, the construction details were designed so that each trade can work separately and independently. The structures are painted in white to help the natural light reveal the space and highlight its geometries and proportions, as well as to integrate the white plastic forms of the more common industrial technical terminals. The mineral surfacing of the ground floor, which forms the plinth and establishes a spatial continuity between interior and exterior, makes the building seem as if were floating. This effect is achieved by using a simple porcelain stoneware, both durable and economical, whose pattern is achieved through the industrial manufacturing process. All the components of this architecture are guided by a constant quest for meaning that is driven by a sense of economy and simplicity. This results in a pragmatism that we hope retains a sense of magic!
