Grasse, France
Created by Ivry Serres and Emmanuelle, and Laurent Beaudouin of Beaudouin Architectes, the Charles Nègre Media Library is a space permeable to light whose design is based on an architectural approach that is very attentive to the context and fits in well with the town’s heritage.
Charles Nègre Media Library has recently been awarded a 2023 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Grasse is a small city in Southern France characterized by its narrow streets, freshness, colors, vaulted passages, and steep slopes.
It gives the site a charming atmosphere but also provokes feelings of pleasant surprise and emotion.
The media library is inspired by the unique character of the urban structure and plays with the tensions and proximities between the buildings.
The project also takes up the subtle material relationships between the public buildings and the urban fabric and uses, with a modern vision, some of the traditional language and materials.
As a counterpoint to this density, the building offers visual and scenic openings to the neighborhood and to the distance.
The building thus becomes a place from which to contemplate the city.
A tower/belvedere on the street allows a direct view towards the house of the great Grasse artist Charles Nègre (1820-1880), while the terrace on the top level highlights a frontal view of the sea and another framing leads towards the tower of the Cathedral Notre Dame du Puy.
The media library is truly designed as a space that is permeable to light while preserving interior coolness. Its architecture is designed to filter the sun during the day and restore a lace of light in the evening.
The dual appearance during the day and at night is one of the major qualities of the site. This luminous presence will be gentle, discreet, and without excessive glare.
The greatest attention is paid to the quality of the lighting inside.
The reading areas receive subdued daylight, softened by the fluted white concrete columns that surround the building.
These columns protect the recessed glass façade from direct sunlight.
The sunlight also penetrates directly into the interior through a skylight that crosses the two levels of the reading rooms to illuminate the reception area.
This solution becomes reversible in the evening so that the building gently illuminates the public space like a lantern.
The building is a light sponge during the day and becomes an urban photophore in the evening.
The project responds to the paradox of being both visible through the strength and quality of its presence, and discreet in its volumes and materials.
The activities of the media library are revealed without being totally displayed to the public.
It is an urban project as a large covered public space that improves pedestrian relations within the neighborhood.
The media library, located in the heart of the city center, is not conceived as an isolated monument: it is intended to be a real catalyst for cultural life on the scale of the entire city. Here, more than integration, the project proposes a poetic of the situation.
Project: Charles Nègre Media Library
Architects: Ivry Serres Architecture
Lead Architect: Ivry Serres
Associate Architects: Beaudouin Architectes
Associate Architect Team: Emmanuelle and Laurent Beaudouin
Design Team: Farida Aroun, Aurélie Husson, Noémie Gaineau, Christophe Thierry, Charles Signe, Benjamin Vassia, and Hugo Marquet
General Contractor: Fayat Batiment
Client: City of Grasse
Sketches: Ivry Serres and Laurent Beaudouin
Photographers: Fernando Guerra – FG+SG
