Community Hall / graal

Curated by Hadir Al Koshta

Text description provided by the architects. Spread out over a vast area along the Mauldre valley, Beynes is composed of an old town, home to the majority of services and institutions, and adjoined by three residential hamlets, a military camp and a national forest. At the junction of these four inhabited neighbourhoods, and away from any urban development, the new community hall asserts itself prominently in this hilly agricultural landscape punctuated by suburban housing. The challenge in designing this building is to fit in both, a domestic and a rural scale, while at the same time offering a central facility with which all residents can identify, thereby reinforcing their sense of belonging to this dispersed territory. Located alongside the departmental road serving the valley, the building overlooks an agricultural wasteland created by the same road, the railway line below and an old local road, to which the building must logically connect to. A hybrid is formed from an iconic "roadside" architecture and a regionalist reimagination of the agricultural barn, the hall emerges from the ground as a softly materialized mineral volume, covered by a two-faceted, slender gable roof that cuts into the landscape.

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