School of Engineers in Bretagne / ANMA

Architects: ANMA
Location: 100 Lorient, Corancy, France
Architect In Charge: Nicolas Michelin, Michel Delplace, Cyril Trétout
Project Director: Etienne Chalet-Hayard
Project Manager: Ronan Le Hyaric
Area: 5,743 sqm
Year: 2013
Photographs: Sergio Grazia

General Consultancy: BETIBA
Sound Consultancy: ABC Decibel
Economic Consultancy: ANMA
Associated Architect: Rouillé Architectes Associés
Client: Communauté d’agglomération du pays de Lorient
Cost: 8,375,000 € HT

From the architect. South Brittany’s Higher School of Engineering is a microcosm the unity of which is organized around the compact, colorful central monolith from which the building’s two wings radiate. The monolith contains two essential areas: the amphitheater and the cafeteria.

Starting in the competition phase, the design for this central room was contributed to by artist David Saltiel. The school is part of an overall reflection by ANMA about interstitial spaces. Fostering interaction between students, teachers, researchers and staff, they are essential to the process of the school’s positive synergy. Whether they enable students and faculty to isolate themselves (like the faculty council’s meeting room and its terrace overlooking the entire building) or come together (like the tiered terraces of the roof), they shape the sense of the same shared place.

With each place of higher education it has designed ANMA manifests its ambition to go beyond briefs, offer living space and shared venues that enable students to live and learn together. The polyvalent spaces are organized in a rationale of flows. Study cells where students may meet to work together are added to the traditional classrooms. Learning is no longer isolated but networked and connected.

The concourses become public spaces connected to the city. The university thus opens onto its environment with a idea borrowed from the American campus model but applied on a French scale with constraints of density and mixed use with housing briefs. Interactions between the student city and the city of everyday life incorporate these different projects into the same rationale of urban planning.