Albert Einstein School / N+B Architectes

Architects: N+B Architectes
Location: Bagnols –sur-Cèze, France
Directors in Charge: Elodie Nourrigat & Jacques Brion
Associate Architect: Francis Privat
Project Area: 20,000 sqm
Budget: 17,000,000 €
Project Year: 2006-2010
Photographs: Paul Kozlowski

The High School Albert Einstein, Brassens site, is a big building of the 60’s. Built with a model, it is composed by high linear buildings from 60 to 80 cm lengh and big metallic workshops. Site’s analysis shows several functional gaps. Today it is important to change establishment’s image by the way of idea and contemporary vision.

plan 01

- Reconquest’s strategy “Find place’s scale” The stake is to reconquest the human scale in building and exterior spaces. The project draws one’s inspiration from campus model which presents the advantage to be flexible and to allow a better identification education’s poles. This intervention process also allows to students to find easily a way and fit into a social life while being supervised (easy reading of circulations, gratitude of spaces).

- Find centrality, establishment heart close to all the functions The court is the major element of the project, meeting’s place but also transition. Its localization offers direct connection with the cafeteria, restaurant place, administration, workshop, general teaching room, school life. Here gather the students during their free time. That is why it is necessary to propose qualities of specific spaces, easily appropriable, playful and to bring a feature to the exteriors arrangements. The landscape treatment of the court is voluntary urban type like central place, mainly mineral, allowing a differentiation with gardens.

- Realize low heights buildings, low influence on the ground to get a better distribution and space’s occupation. This flexibility allows adapting itself to the program and to the discipline in constant evolution
- A real landscape project

Spaces are treated and easily recognizable to assert an idea of sequences and gratitude education’s pole. Gardens between the buildings are like screens improving a better visual and thermal comfort and offering landscape diversity. Visual borderlines are more and more wide thanks to the preserving of the green space in the Northwest of the High School.

- To join over time

To create a new school it is to fall in the future and to think of the duration. It is not enough to produce a building operating during its delivery. It is necessary to give to it the strength to cross the time and to be a successful tool. Our intervention takes into account the educational project, the architectural flexibility, the environmental protection and the public character of the building. For it is necessary to become aware of the place which the intervention is going to join and to bring to the foreground its fundamental qualities. The natural elements have to become the symbols of the equipments all the more when it is about places of training. The architectural project becomes itself an educational object, because it shows a conscious act of a reality but especially stakes in the environmental scale, in a concern to leave with the future generations a healthy living environment.

sections 01

To think of a sustainable development crosses well on by the qualitative consideration of materials, a technical work on the management of the energies, but also by a logic the layout of places. It is in the sense that we began this project, by joining in the time. The intervention which we propose allows restoring coherence and featuring to the set by means of a new spatial scenography.