André Parent Cultural Center

André Parent Cultural Center / Olivier Werner Architecte

Architects: Olivier Werner Architecte

Location: Anzin, France

Project Manager: Franz Bourgeois

Area: 749 sqm

Photographs: Courtesy of Olivier Werner Architecte

Some places have a stronger symbolical potential than others: the plot where the new city equipment was built is one of them. The new cultural center stands at the entrance of the city, where its main axis "the avenue Anatole France" crosses with the rue Lucien Jonas that leads to a housing suburb recently renovated. The building was erected on an empty plot that didn't establish any relationship between the 60's rectangular housing buildings of the neighborhood and the traditional brick house typologies that are on the avenue. It is then the first goal of the building to link these different fabrics, to work as a hyphen at an urban scale. The volume is a combination of voids and filled that interact with the broad range of the surrounding scales. It opens and closes, hides and shows, raises up and down.