Nantes School of Architecture / Lacaton & Vassal

Architects: Lacaton & Vassal
Location: Nantes, France
Design Team: Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal
Project Year: 2009
Project Area: 15,150 sqm
Photographs: Philippe Ruault

In building a structure of great capacity, the project design comes up with a scheme capable of creating a set of rich and diverse situations of interest to the School of architecture, the city and the landscape.

Three decks at nine, sixteen and twenty-two meters above the natural ground level, served by a gentle sloping external ramp, progressively put the ground surface of the city in touch with the sky overhead.

A lightweight steel structure redivides the height of these main levels. It enables the spaces devoted to the program to be generously installed and creates a system adapted to their extension and their future evolution.

Linked to the spaces of the program are ample, double-height volumes with non-attributed functions, the transparent facades of which harness the sun’s rays and vouchsafe the indoor climate. On the initiative of the students, teachers or visitors, these spaces become the locus of possible appropriations, events and programming. At any one moment the adaptation of the school to new interventions and its reconversion are possible.

Like a pedagogical tool, the project questions the program and the practices of the school as much as the norms, technologies and its own process of elaboration.