Councils Chamber in Brest / Stéphane Bigoni and Antoine Mortemard

Architects Stéphane Bigoni and Antoine Mortemard shared with us their proposal for a competition organized by the city of Brest (Britany) in 2008 for the construction of its councils chamber. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Three architecture offices were invited on this competition.

But then we met the Crisis… and we discovered that the project, due to a lack of financing, was made fruitless and would not thus be born.

The municipality had decided to implant its headquarters in an ancient listed building and to build an extension under its front square to accommodate the councils chamber.

We have chosen three themes to answer this underground programm.

First of all with the use of material which we wanted very present. Here, no paint on plaster… the raw concrete of the structure becomes internal facades, ground, ceiling… it is used as if the building had been dug into the earth. When it appears from the ground, it is covered with sheets of oxidized metal, the skin of which reminds of the internal concrete.

The second answer consisted in getting free of any predefined forms or geometries due to the nearby constructions : no parallelism of walls, no “simple boxes”… This volumetric freedom is essentially dictated by movement.

Finally, a long work on the landscape allowed us to sometimes link the “height” and the “bottom”, to articulate interior and exterior spaces, to admit an exotic garden into the councils chamber, to let the square be invaded by wild plants in the style of a moor, as a piece of natural landscape.

Architects: Stéphane Bigoni and Antoine Mortemard
Location: Brest, France
Project team: François Baste, Aymeric Goutal, Romain Malidor
Client: City of Brest
Engeneer: Cetba Ingenierie
Landscape architects: Base
Scénography: Thierry Guignard
Acoustic: Orfea
Design Year: 2008
Constructed erea: 1300 sqm
Images: Platform, Bigoni Mortemard