Kergrid, Vannes, France | atelier arcau

The Departmental Energy Union of Morbihan organizes and develops the supply and distribution of electricity but also public lighting, heat networks, electro-mobility and communication networks throughout the department. It was obviously essential, when creating its headquarters, to build a pilot tertiary building for a region that produces just 10% of the energy it consumes. The 'Kergrid' project is a prototype of smart-building aimed at demonstrating that a profitable and reproducible solution is possible today.
At the order of the stake for atelier arcau is therefore complex. It must respond to the nature of functional programming : offices of the SDEM but also headquarters of the water union and the association of mayors, technical premises related to the nature of experiments, reception areas of the public and elected officials union communes, meeting rooms. Then, the technical, economic and regulatory issues must be integrated into the project : to test the possibility of making different energy solutions work together, while respecting a profitability and a return on investment, and to leave room for a necessary capacity of experimentation. Finally, the image of the building must carry the ambition of the owner to make its headquarters a building that is an example for tertiary facilities in Brittany. Difficult exercise than to implement a non-standard experience.
As part of the morphology of a site overlooking a thalweg, the building takes place on a slope that it reveals by marrying its relief. It is organized in two arms stretched in length whose game levels allows an alternation between two heights, ground floor and patio, in a subtle relationship of full and empty allowing from inside a wide opening to the landscape. Building of 3000 m2 label 'passiv haus', it compensates for its relative non-compactness by strong inertia and a grip on the ground favoring an architectural sobriety. A black cladding, dressed with vertical strips of wood used as sunscreens, comes to standardize all the functions of the site and carries an image of architecture both vernacular and contemporary.
Neither isolated nor dependent on the energy network, thanks to its two wind turbines and its 850 m2 of photovoltaic panels, the building is both able to disappear from the network but also to reinject - once its own consumption ensured - the renewable energy, which it produces and stores, in a battery system.
Delivered in 2013, the 'Kergrid' project received the 2013 Smart Building Award and the 2014 AMO National Award.