client

Communauté de communes du Pays de Weppe

 

architect

Hugues Fontenas

assistant architect

Nolwenn Caillard

 

museography

atelier à Kiko

landscape

OLM

engineering

ETR (structure and mechanics)

cost surveyor

MDETC

 

floor area

600 m2

 

cost

1 600 000 € HT

 

calendar

2011 – competition

 

programme

Museum commemorating the  Battle of Fromelles,  19 July 1916, where 8500 lives, mostly Australian, were lost in a 24-hour period.

 

design

A rough concrete monolith embedded into the slope of the site.
Main interior elements of the inner museum  correspond to polished metal volumes that emerging from the top of the monolith and facing towards the battlefield horizon.
The lobby,  a bright  and colourful space inside the dark monolith, opens widely onto the Main Street of the village.
The collections, in this introvert volume, are organised around a large panoramic cyclo representing the battlefield, itself actually several kilometres distant from the museum.
A project designed to simplify the construction and promote climate stability.

 

competition images

Kaupunki



111, bd Beaumarchais — 75003 Paris
T: +33 1 45 79 01 49 — 
en fr 

Museum of the Battle of Fromelles competition

2011



Exceeding expectations
Develop each project following a re-evaluation of both programme and anticipated results. Reply beyond the expectations of the programme. The principal architectural objective is to be found in the research of added, unexpected qualities.

 

Evolving surfaces
Architecture to be also conceived as terrains to be occupied in the future by still uncertain or improbable uses. Architecture as “reverse ruins” in an upturned archaeology that facilitates or suggests inevitable transformations. Therefore, when it might be tempting to be just spectacular, never hesitate to be simple and complex.

 

Comforts
Pay particular attention to all the complexity factors – functional, technical, regulatory, economic, aesthetic – and use them as a basis for future comforts. Distinguish structures, enclosures or equipment to consider temporal aspects of the project in a prospect of reversibility and diversity of uses.

 

Artificiality
Advocate and assert the profound artificiality, the non-naturalness of architecture. Conceive architecture in a grey ecology without naivety and in creative phase with the contradictions of our environment.

 

Aspirations
Associate production and research in resonance with an analysis of actual facts. Remain independent in thought to stimulate, guide and increase the pertinence of a project. Propose reality as an aspiration to do differently.

 

Founded in 2006, the office has developed its activity mainly in the field of cultural facilities with a strong interest and expertise in programmes related to the exhibition and preservation of all types of collections, from archaeology to contemporary art. Hugues Fontenas also teaches and conducts research on themes strongly connected to work in the office.

 

111, bd Beaumarchais — 75003 Paris
T: +33 1 45 79 01 49 — 
en fr