Music & Dance School | DE-SO Architectes

The building takes its roots within an unstructured urban site made of blank spaces (playgrounds, wide avenues…) and building as objects from the modernist urban development (blocks of council flats, gymnasium and school).
The Music Academy building remind of a « music box », solid and sober with its brick walls, precious by its gold copper alloy cladding.
Its shape cuts out harmoniously its skyline. The rhythm from its golden openings punctuates the facades depending of their orientations and their needs in natural light.

This public equipment shapes an identity and homogeneity out of the steps of the surroundings and the buildings neighbourhood.

The two mains materials used for the facades of that project, dark bricks and copper, complete one another without neither luxury nor apparent protocol:
- The dark brick evokes the institution’s permanence
- The copper-aluminium alloy («Tecu Gold »), reveals the sensuality and the plasticity in the teaching arts

The project sheltered atmospheres, scales, practices and various places within a single volume. The identity of the venue will be associated to its creative function with accurate effects and proportions, rhythms and tensions.

The multiple vocation of this cultural equipment is suggested by its fragmentation. This one reveals different kinds of teachings, creates cross sections and interstices allowing the indirect and various lights diffusion depending on days and seasons. Contrasts between different atmospheres contribute to give an identity to each activity (dance studio, music academy, restitution group room) and its spotting within the building:
Openings overlooking outside and lights for the dance studios upstairs, inwardness for the music academy giving a selection of sizes and height to its rooms, all of them wrapped around a patio and its maple (wood used in lute-making). Easy accessibility for the restitution group room, multipurpose tool, situated in front of the principal entrance, enjoying a double height and a relative independence.
The mineral flat facades, mat and rough, are carved up by long splays; these ones reveal a gold coppered matter, smooth and reflective, which sparkled the light through tall steel “harp” and perforated panel filters. The diurnal and night-time external atmosphere of the building will set up between the dark brick and the golden copper.

The two façade’s matters complete each other harmoniously: charcoal grey and gold, absorbent and reflective surfaces, mineral porosity and metallic brightness. They tune together with exactitude and set to music as the musical practice requires it too.