Montpellier, France
Designed as a condensed city by Mateo Arquitectura, ESMA (École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) in Montpellier, France is a public educational building that includes a range of facilities and student housing.
ESMA Montpellier stands on the site of a former army barracks, specifically on the parade ground.
The site is surrounded by military buildings to be reused and new buildings that will shape a new neighborhood.
The designers outline the parade ground, respecting the great trees around its edges and defining an open communal courtyard.
The volume, though rigid, seeks to adapt to the place.
The brief was complex and highly attractive; a small condensed city: a large inner plaza, a restaurant, a large technical space: the film set, lecture rooms, and academic spaces along with dwellings, sports facilities, etc.
A small city with academic, leisure and residential activities.
The project seeks to address this vital condensation in a way that is at once orderly and free.
The building is hard and repetitive, closed on the street side and more open in its inner courtyard.
Made of mass concrete, it is softened by the different textures and colors it offers us: rougher and darker in contact with the ground, and smoother and lighter as it rises towards the sky.
The mass is protected and controls its relationship with the sun by means of slats, awnings, or blinds.
In the academic spaces in particular, the designers wanted to achieve different degrees of brightness; the bedrooms are intended to be more opaque.
The building’s image is also conceived in relation to the great trees and the buildings that surround it.
Project: ESMA Montepellier
Architects: Mateo Arquitectura
Design Team: Xavier Montclús, Benoist Desfonds, Julie Le Baud, and Raluca Desa
Client: ESMA (École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) Montpellier
Photographers: Aldo Amoretti and Marie-Carline Lucat
