Unique Planed with Various Faces and Spaces for Daily Youth Life
As a mixed-use project, Space Guy Môquet represents the social ideals of the city of Cabestany, France. Consisting of a leisure center, a dance hall and collective housing, the project’s ambition is to attract young people in this new space made for them. Located at the entrance of the city, the project looks massive and attractive thanks to its shape and materials, yet sits on a small site.
The compactness of the form and its orientation provide large outdoor spaces for grass, trees, a vegetated basin, and a small entrance plaza. The project is a collection of several geometries that seem to pivot in many directions. Each concrete elevation shows a different face to the neighborhood.
The building’s scale is reduced thanks to the embedding of its form below grade. The mixture of its internal program is visible from the central atrium. Half-levels connect the spaces and create generous, continuous volumes. An external staircase and terraces give independent access to all the higher levels, offering users freedom of use.
Deployed on the three lower semi-levels, the Youth Space is defined as an open space, which can be divided as needed. It is organized around an atrium, which is the heart of the building connecting all other spaces. The dance hall is connected to the Youth Space by the atrium, but is also accessible via the staircase and the terrace. The collective housing is located on the upper level, and benefits from the roof terrace with the view of the surrounding landscape and the sunset.
The interiors are bright with concrete and wood in pale colors. The angles made by surfaces, edges, spaces, and circulation areas makes for a dynamic experience. Although the uses are clearly separated, the angular and overlapping relationships that the spaces make with each other emphasizes that this building symbolizes the variety of daily youth life.
The facades of the building are built with only one single material, concrete. The sophistication of the material is provided by a double treatment, according to the faces of the project: the digs are made of smooth concrete, and the facade in the foreground is made of concrete molded into vertical brise-soleils, also known as window louvres. The treatment of the facades is adapted for each orientation. Some facades are thus permeable, where louvres or overhangs reduce sunlight, while others are more opaque, to protect against high winds. The project forms a homogeneous whole, thanks to the molded concrete elevations following the rhythm of vertical window louvres.
Project: Youth center / Space Guy Môquet / Location: Cabestany, France / Architects: Oeco architectes / Engineering: TPFI / Structural works: Fondeville / Gross floor area:1,776 m² / Cost: EUR 2,820,000 / Completion: 2017 / Photograph: Kévin Dolmaire(courtesy of the architect)
