Courthouse of Saint-Laurent du Maroni - Guyane
3142-IPA-LDX.GF-2023
Architect: Ignacio Prego Architectures
Client: APIJ
Status: Competition (2023)
Location: Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana
Coordinates: 5.4881310, -53.9698210
Climate: Hot, Tropical
Materials: Concrete, Wood
Environment: Forest
Visualizers: Masslab, Diorama
Scale: 6.600 ㎡ Medium
Types: Administrative center, Institutional

Located on the edge of the Amazon Forest, our project for the courthouse requires a figure of monumentality. Immediately recognizable in the distant landscape by its silhouette with taut lines supported on its 4 façades by a plant inspired colonnade. The courthouse therefore creates a breathing space, vegetal and lush in the shape of an ellipse, a true plant sanctuary delimited by covered spaces serving as both covered pathways and waiting areas for families. Behind the garden, emerges an architecture of balance of which the classic figures of the judicial institution resonate like echoes. It is a symmetrical architecture, structured with cornices, entablatures, and propylaea.

But it is also about assuming the specificity of the territory and installing the court in a universe specific to western Guyana. An architecture intimately linked to the plant world, made of flexible lines which carry, lift, shelter and protect. The columns, with their spindle profile, their random location and their coppery brown color merge here with the trunks of the royal palm trees, thus blurring the border between the built and the plant, the judicial and the tropical. The silhouette of the Tribunal turns towards the west, offering through this convex figure a posture of benevolent openness.

Collaborator: Groupe Kardham, Bouygues Bâtiment Centre Sud Ouest | Post date: 18/01/2024 | Views: 607