Villerupt, France
“Buildings of contemporary writing too often tell only of a simple disinterest in history. We are looking for the exact opposite,” says Jérôme Sigwalt.
K Architectures designs L’Arche – Micheville Cultural Center, a hybrid cultural setting where various artistic disciplines, creative industries, and digital arts can coexist.
The Arch is built at the foot of a monumental wall.
This high and thick wall, built of stone, supported a technical platform on which the extracted ore was unloaded before being transported to the steel mills below.
Faced with this striking landscape that could have inspired the “wall” of the series “Game of Thrones,” and faced with this working-class history that has creolized the region with a strong Italian consonance, Karine Herman and Jérôme Sigwalt were inspired by an unprecedented context.
As a place of sharing and socializing, the structure consists of a bar restaurant, a theater, a performance space, a fab lab, and an immersive digital art gallery.
The enormous development has been made smaller and generously opens up into the Esplanade through arcades and is profiled in a vast paved staircase that allows our eyes to slip to the heights of the wall, which is beveled on the fifth façade.
A building that combines architecture and digital art will be installed on the high landing, which is intended to serve as a belvedere.
The architects’ narrative architecture has invented a particularly singular, even endemic form.
Its massive mineral morphology responds with the same power to the disproportionate wall that borders it.
His writing also refers to another gigantic retaining structure built not far away and which is honeycombed according to the principle of arcades.
A timeless theme that is reminiscent of a similar support structure built in Italy some 2000 years ago, the Colosseum in Rome.
It is also in Italy that the architects were inspired by an almost universal reference.
It is a small building that was built in the last century in the wild and phantasmagorical creeks of the island of Capri.
A big auditorium with very ambitious capacities for adapting to a capacity of up to 1,140 people is framed by inner facades that open out to different spaces, including the 147-seat cinema, the immersive gallery, the “fab lab,” and, above all, a vast auditorium.
Regarding the interior spaces, a naturally lit hall welcomes the audience in a warm environment that is accentuated by artworks designed in the opulent style of theatrical foyers.
The staircase that leads to the main hall’s balcony is removed from the internal façade so that it can be seen in the room as a massive piece of art.
Chandeliers made especially for the space offer lighting.
Two models—one concave and the other convex—are created using a technique similar to the scenographic structures.
Their assembly is fairly low-tech, and their frame is made of bare steel.
These frameworks are built to hold up cone-shaped lines of technical lighting equipment.
To create the prominent hues of a Lorrain sunset, show gelatin is put on the bulbs.
In general, fading tones or concrete grays are used to select the colors.
The remaining areas are matte-whitened as if powdered with Meudon white.
The architects note they never push their picturesque referents beyond the limits of abstraction, refusing to let their work stand out in history.
Not so that they don’t have an age, but so that they have several ages.
Project: L’Arche – Micheville Cultural Center
Architects: K architectures
Lead Architects: Herman Sigwalt, Jérôme Sigwalt and Emilie Bourdie
Client: Community of Municipalities Pays Haut Val D’Alzette
Photographers: Guillaume Amat
