Description

The award of the French architecture publisher “Le Moniteur” in the category of first works in 2007 went to a young architecture office from Nice headed by Pierre-André Comte and Stéphane Vollenweider for their complex of workshops in Valbonne.
Valbonne, a small town in the hinterland of the Côte d’Azur set out to create not just any old business park (Zone Artisanale) but a commercial settlement for trades and crafts (Cité Artisanale). The municipality of Valbonne is most well-known for the Sophia Antipolis Technology Park, which was built on a 2,300 hectare site in a pine forest outside the town. To strengthen the position of the old town, the municipality launched a competition in 2005 for a complex of workshops on a 4,500 m² nearby that could then be sold in small units at a favourable price.
The competition entry by the young architectural firm Comte Vollenweider, convinced the jury with its cohesive urban concept. Unlike the other entries, which distributed the workshops across the site in open blocks, they proposed a kind of perimeter wall that follows the site boundaries and turns its back on its surroundings. This introverted settlement pattern recalls that of the Flemish Béguinages. The building ensemble is laid out as an asymmetrical trapezoid with open corners that establish visual and physical connections between the block interior and the street. The base storeys of the workshops are four metres high and form the city wall of the “Cité”, which faces inwards onto a central green square.
The floor areas of the 23 commercial units range from 50 to 900 m², and together total some 4,500 m². Discussions were held in advance with the future owners so that the necessary areas could be determined more precisely. A double module of 14 by 21 metres can be connected to the basic module of 7 by 14 metres (that is just under 100 m²) with a single sloping roof (the eaves is 6 m high, the ridge 8 m high), resulting in floor areas of 294 m² and more. The complexity of the building volumes is created by the offset mirrored arrangement of the modules which cause the galvanised sheet metal monopitch roofs to rise and fall in zigzag lines.
The dynamism of the façades is a product of the combination of orthogonal elements of different sizes and materiality: sliding doors made of wood, translucent panels made of polycarbonate, bottom-hung windows, metal grilles in front of the ventilation shafts and wall cladding made of galvanised corrugated sheet metal. The result is an abstract composition of surfaces of different qualities in different planes and levels. The external concrete walls have a constant height but follow the course of the terrain, stepping down with the ground plan grid. The formwork was carefully constructed of compressed chipboard panels, giving the concrete a subtle texture that picks up incident light in different ways. The loadbearing structure is a timber frame construction; inside, the concrete walls are also partly clad with chipboard panels.
The Cité Artisanale is also notable for its sensitive treatment of the landscape, especially the preservation of a small copse in the middle of the property. Together with landscape planner François Navarro, the architects have achieved a careful synthesis with precisely formulated transitions between the building and the terrain. The floor slabs in front of the workshop entrances are made of betón balayé, a brushed concrete that, at 20 €/m², costs a quarter of the usual fair-faced concrete. By keeping the construction costs down, the workshops could be sold for 1200 €/m².

Originally published in Bauwelt  15.2008, pp. 24-29, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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