Maison du Temps Libre à Stains / Gaetan Le Penhuel Architectes

Architect: Gaetan Le Penhuel Architectes
Location: Ville de Stains, AMO: Sodedat 93, France
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Hervé Abbadie, David Cousin-Marsy

In the re-orchestration of a complex urban fabric relaxed, this new facility serves as a visual symbolic and social relay between garden city from the theater to the site of Les Tartres. Like the nearby water reservoirs of the gardened area, this new equipment irrigates physically and culturally the rich neighborhood of energies.

Our project seeks to express outside its internal complexity, resulting from the multitude of activities. Thus, from the junction of the streets, the building appears in the new urban logic. We propose to hold the angle of intersection with the volume raised at the first floor houses the main entrance of the building.The name of the new equipment proudly expresses its goal front: House of Free Time. The general expression responds to its environment by assembling elementary volumes in relation to the surrounding buildings. Inside, a set of playful forms, poetic and pure transparency offered in the street, inviting them to discover a world internalized.

This program consists of stable spaces (library, auditorium, nursery/house keeping) while others may change over time, (offices, toy library, workshops, training spaces), and be flexible. Thus, this new equipment represents an attractive focal point in the future of the Clos St. Lazare.