The site seems to be a place apart, belonging both to the great landscape of the airport and to the intimacy of this fringe of the city, composed of a suburban fabric and logistics buildings. Facing the runways, the rooms are laid out in two cubic volumes of the same dimensions. Two readings of the building are offered at distant and close views by a play of imbrications and materialities between the volumes of the rooms, which take up the typology of the gabled house, while the cubic metal envelope responds to the contiguous industrial hangars.
The building's structure, designed entirely in timber frame, houses a large convivial space that can be divided into two or three rooms, the deep beam drops of which form acoustic alcoves. The alternation of porticos and wooden beams imparts rhythm to the interior of the rooms, revealing the building's constructive system and giving it a domestic atmosphere.
The perforated corrugated cladding of the façade gives the whole its public and institutional dimension, allowing the hall to reinforce its presence in this peri-urban landscape and to offer a changing and renewed image of the facility through the play of reflections and transparency.
Bio Graal is an agency founded by Carlo Grispello and Nadine Lebeau, dedicated to architecture and urban strategies, which strives to give precedence to the economy of the project, constructive logics and materiality in the development of their undertakings. Their projects develop, through a sober and objective approach, in order to give a true place to the role of the territorial survey, the public dimension and uses. Graal aspires to render the specificities of a place and a commission through a language that is non-decisive, independent and concerned with responding to contemporary issues.
Other prizes Dezeen Award 2021 (selection) The Plan Award 2021 (selection) AZ Award 2021 (finalist) Archello, Top 10 concrete projects of 2020 (selection) D’A, Prix 10+1 (selection) Choiseul City of Tomorrow (selection) Italian Architect Prize 2017, (selection) Trophées Logement & Territoires 2017, (finalist) Architizer A+Awards 2017 (finalist) The Plan Award 2017, (finalist) Europe 40 Under 40 Awards 2016 (awarded) Europe’s Emerging Young Architects and Designers, (awarded) ArchiDesignClub Awards 2016, (awarded) Building of the Year Awards 2016 Archidaily, (selection)
