Contemporary architecture next to a castle

Building next to a historic building it is always an exercise in position, not only physical, but above all cultural. It means deciding where to speak from, what distance to keep, what language to adopt to declare one’s own time without pretending to rewrite that of others. There new multipurpose hall of Châteaufortnear Paris, designed by Leo Berelliniwas born exactly within this question, addressed without stylistic shortcuts and without nostalgia.

The context is that of Domaine d’Ors, a set of service architecture linked to the castleorganized around a courtyard and surrounded by a protected landscape. The designers’ choice here is to favor one continuity that passes from the ground, from the section, from the extent to which the architecture rests on the ground. The new volume does not impose itself on the landscape, sliding into it. It is an architecture that accepts the slope as a rule, takes it as a construction fact and transforms it into a spatial principle.

The room is largely underground: of the new building, in fact, the roof emerges, which becomes a usable surface and viewpoint, and the entrance, declared as a threshold. Everything else works by subtractionand the long raw earth wall accompanies the front like a geological section transformed into architecture. It is not a covering or a decorative device, but the physical account of the embeddedness in the groundof the mass that grows following the slope until reaching the access level.

Inside, the large basement classroom is the key space of the project. A unitary, controlled environment, where the material does not seek scenographic effects. The rammed earth walls, flanked by the hemp casting, define a stable, almost intimate atmosphere, in which acoustics, comfort and structure coincide. Technology does not show itself as performance, it is deposited in the construction choicesin the ability of the elements to work together, in the coherence between section, use and climate.

The relationship with historical architecture therefore does not pass through direct comparison or programmatic contrast. The new building agrees to stand slightly behindliterally underneath, entrusting the coverage and the wall with the task of marking its presence. It is a form of respect that does not give up autonomy, a way of building the contemporary on the shoulders of giants, or of what already exists, letting the soil dictate the grammar of the project

www.berelliniarchitecte.com