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Continuity and distance

By offering evolving work space, PAN architecture’s project fot the modular extension of the Marseille’s Architecture School has drawn on an industrialized construction process as an answer to considerable regulatory and budgetary constraints.

PAN architecture, Modular extension to Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Marseille, Luminy campus, Marseille

PAN Architecture has delivered a modular extension to Marseille’s Architecture School.

Keeping to the composition of the block plan, the existing system is extended, and a new “branch” has been created for horizontal growth. The building/outside traffic dialectic has thus been reinvested in. The project unites the three ground-level workshops in a simple, autonomous volume connected by a gallery space that runs along the southern facade and reinterprets the campus’ passageways. The proportions are close to those of the existing big workshops, and the alignments reinforce the sobriety and the idea of belonging to a whole.

The building stands on a high platform to take full advantage of the promontory’s exceptional location. With a playfully variable sizing of the paving stones, this new butte is composed of the stone salvaged from the terracing. The conservation of the existing trees was an opportunity to invent a mineral landscape of rocks and wild gardens where the pathways are integrated in and give structure to the venue. The surroundings are highlighted by details and raw materials that required local know-how and contrast with the industrial, prefabricated nature of the building.

The work of incorporating the extension into its environment by using local shapes has been counterbalanced by having to be distinct from what already existed. Layered colors depending on the façade’s orientation define the volume as an autonomous object by giving it abstract value. The colors are of the soil, pine-tree bark and the plantlife of the inlet (calanque).

Darkish, the facade facing the ENSA-M building’s side is clad with vertical metallic strips inspired by the dark tones of the natural location. On the vine arbor side the facade is rougher with cladding in corrugated iron to better confirm its belonging to this harsh, barren space opening onto the landscape.

This new passageway in the ENSA-M is a lane, a terrace and a corridor, a multiple space good for working outdoors shared between the three workshops. In the form of a vine arbor running along the southern facade of the new workshops, it is an in-between space protected from the sun by a natural chestnut-rush fence (a device borrowed from farming) set into the galvanized steel frame. The overall galvanized steel structure is conceived and sized to form a free frame as a support for spatial experiments, i.e. arranged volumes, partitionings and closures.