The music, drama and dance academy building in the new town of Montigny-le-Bretonneux stands on a triangular site. It offers distant views of the famous apartment block Les Arcades du Lac that Ricardo Bofill made in 1985.
The building has four levels. It includes drama rooms, a large black-box auditorium, music rooms of different sizes, a recording studio, three dance rooms with changing rooms, and an underground car park. The spaces are spread along an uneven axis that generously offers convivial areas looking out at the town or the building's main sections.
The lengthways cross-section is the view that best helps understand the strong bond that we have created between all these spaces. Three large skylights punctuate the ceiling, which becomes distorted to let in natural light from all sides better. A monumental staircase rises in this atrium, which unfolds diagonally, stretching up towards the light and dance rooms. Dichroic films cover the large panes of glass. Their colours change in accordance with your position and that of the sun. The spaces are tied together by this giant kaleidoscope diffusing ever-changing colours.
Bio Located in the heart of Strasbourg, Dominique Coulon & Associés is a firm of architects of national and international renown.
For more than 25 years, the agency has earned a reputation for the quality of the public facilities it designs. It has worked on a wide and varied range of programmes, including a media library, music school, auditorium, school complex, swimming pool, sports facilities, a residential home for the dependent elderly, and housing.
In 2022 he was awarded the Golden Medal by the French Academy of Architecture.
Other prizes The agency has received many awards and distinctions: firstly in 1996 with the Prix de la Première Oeuvre for the ‘Pasteur’ lower secondary school in Strasbourg, followed by a number of nominations for the Équerre d’Argent award in 1999, 2002 and 2003. In 2006 it was a prize-winner in the PEB1 Compendium of Exemplary Educational Establishments organised by the OECD, for the ‘Martin Peller’ school complex in Reims. In 2008 it was nominated for the BSI Swiss Architectural Award and for the European Union prize awarded by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, for the National Drama Centre in Montreuil. It has received a Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Award on three occasions. In 2014, it won the Pool Vision Contest prize in the ‘public pools’ category, for the swimming pool in Bagneux. In 2017 it received the first prize in the Eiffel Trophies rewarding steel architecture, for the Media Library (Third Place) in Thionville, and was nominated for the European Union prize awarded by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, for the residential home for the dependent elderly and the residential centre for handicapped people in Orbec. In 2022, the French Academy of Architecture awards its Grand Gold Medal to Dominique Coulon.
