Architecture don’t have to be built.

This project is a naive dream of a cultural center in the town of Oullins. Cultural centers are a different type of architecture, they usually need to be grandiloquent, impressive, they need to shine.

But I have a problem about this idea, the idea to create a lonely building ‘’overexisting’’ on its wasteland. So the response needed to be simple, elementary. The project is a line, a horizon.

It can be summarised as three ordinary elements. Three rocks on the ground under a glass tray. The culture isn’t a finished object, a jewel that you will display in a museum. It becomes a material that you work, an environment where you experiment.

For Oullins, culture becomes the raw material shaped by the inhabitants. The project consist in three concrete shells, the ‘’rocks’’ reuniting the essential and technique parts of the building.

Around them, the spaces are created by an open plan dedicated to the community which is only partitioned by curtains separations.

Under this floor, in the basement, the rooms are created by steel structure clusters. This flexible plan contains dance and music studios, a library and art galleries.

The roof is a three-dimensional steel structure web that allows the entry of zenithal light as permitting the absolute absence of any column other than the ‘’rocks’’. The project is an open space where freedom is the key.

It imagines that architecture involves people and allows them to be the main element of the building. Ceci n’est pas un centre culturel C’est un matériau brut que travaillent des artisans.