[ Béal & Blanckaert ] Centre of Pedagogic Multimedia Resources

Architects: Béal & Blanckaert
Location: Scientific quarter, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Paris, France
Principals: Antoine Béal and Ludovic Blanckaert
Project Team: J. Ramet, E. Veauvy, T. Foucray, L. Zimny
Bet: HDM – Becquart
Project Area: 950 sqm
Budget: 1,850,000 euro
Project Year: 2007-2009
Photographs: Julien Lanoo

The project is integrated into the scientific university of Lille I. It groups the entire IT motor of the campus and contains also a really sophisticated recording pole, unique in the North of Paris.
We find ourselves here in an urban plan that hesitates between an urbanity that has difficulties to affirm itself and a landscape campus. Far from any judgment and enforcing in a peremptory way our truth, we recapture the ambiguities of the site trough placing a new situated object in it. Indeed, a new footpath discretely structures the place through joining together the parts of the campus that did not know each other.
The equipment is the extension of an existing building, but has to preserve its functional autonomy. A regulated autonomic geometry, based on a crossed picture, contains in its wings the different programmed entities divided in accordance with functional criteria of orientations, proximities and supplies.
The neighboring piles of soil are leveled and put in geometrical forms in relation to the roof of the building. With this roof, the façade, constituted of skins of black zinc, fold and unfold itself, translating the troubles that exist here between landscape and architecture.

from  archdaily