Vendée’s historical museum

The will to dissimulate the 6000 square meters of this program in the country side landscape was written in the brief of the competition Plan01 won in September 2002. The client had clearly expressed his wish that the building’s impact on the landscape had to be limited. The apparent paradox between the will to create an attractive cultural institution and the desire to dissimulate it in the landscape, disappears in front of the site’s beauty: a sensitive landscape between the countryside’s pattern of meadows and hedges, and the riverside. We therefore decided to finely install the program by creating an ambiguous and subtle dialog with nearby nature. Its presence is at the same time discrete and expressive, exploring in turn the themes of enshrining and of rising.

A floating meadow
Hidden underneath it’s landscaped roof the museum is largely open on the river. It’s volume is mysterious, and it is discovered progressively by the approaching visitor, revealing generous and warm spaces. The building – all in monochrome bronze green – is enshrined in the natural geography, on the moving line were the cultivated fields meed the easily flooded banks of the Boulogne river, where the views from the lobby can be framed on the wildest part of the site. The museum’s roof, designed as a fragment of landscape is the project’s main feature. This roof’s complex profiles required long developments through physical and computer modelings: it is made of faces whose relative angles are sufficiently marked to give enough expression to distinguish the building from the natural relief.

Entrance to the museum begins at the junction of two paths. Inspired by the sunken trails between the meadows and hedges (the “bocage”) of rural Vendée, a footbridge crossing through the museum’s two wings dramatizes the approach from the car park to the entrance; giving the visitor a sense of diving into the ground and history of Vendée. Whereas from the bottom path linking it to the nearby memorial of the Vendée wars the museum is perceived as a sequence of 2 pavilions punctuating a walk. The crossing through the building gives an opportunity to scenography two discovery’s: the passage from the bocage’s landscape to that of the river, and views from above on the large hall and the “fresco” which marks the entrances of each exhibition room. The green roof’s movements and the underneath facets adapt themselves to the useful volumes of the spaces they cover.

The roof’s thermal inertia and its large overhangings protect the exhibition and conservation spaces from direct solar overheating. An empty shell. The program’s specificity: it is a new generation museum conceived like a movie studio. The exhibition rooms (2500 sqm) are wide blind sets with technical grids ready to receive a temporary scenography. Splitting the program in two volumes and using a compact “W” organization for the exhibition rooms furthermore reduce the building’s global impact and optimize the accesses from a central lobby and two peripheral galleries. A first space reveals itself at the bottom of the access stairway to welcome and direct visitors. Inside the museum the walls are covered by a continuous printed fabric fresco illustrating the main stages of Vendée’s history. The fresco is a long multicolored ribbon, informative and giving a contrasted answer to the rest of the building’s sobriety.

Plan01 is a collective of 4 architectural offices (Atelier du pont, BP architectures, KOZ, Phileas) composed by ten architects: Jean Bocabeille, Anne-Cécile Comar, Philippe Croisier, Christophe Ouhayoun, Stéphane Pertusier, Ignacio Prego, Dominique Vitti, Anne-Charlotte Zanassi, Julien Zanassi and Nicolas Ziesel. To work together, on each project, implies a permanent challenge of our knowledges and practices. Plan01 produces stunning projects with an unique and atypical look. Through architectural projects and communication actions – exhibitions, books, website, concours privé, competition – Plan01 shows an original approach to practicing architectural trade. Our “alchemical” way of working is based on pleasure and sharing of multiple experiences. Beyond our daily work in our respective offices, the confrontation of ten well determined personalities makes of Plan01 a laboratory of ideas and debates.

project: Vendée’s historical museum
architects: PLAN 01 Jean Bocabeille, Anne-Cécile Comar, Philippe Croisier, Christophe Ouhayoun, Stéphane Pertusier, Ignacio Prego, Dominique Vitti, Anne-Charlotte Zanassi, Julien Zanassi et Nicolas Ziesel, Michel Tan, Laurent Théaux, Francois-Régis Colombani, Maryline Perrier, Virginie Gloria, Hélène Hart
field architect: Michel Joyau
landscape designer: Paysage et Lumière
structural engineers: Arest
service engineers: Delta fluides
scenography: Acora
construction year: 2005
costs: 8.600.000 euro
surface: 6500 sqm
photo: Stéphane Chalmeau