ENSAD Art School, Nancy (FR)
New building
Client: Communauté Grand Nancy (Solorem)
Location: F-54000 Nancy, 84 rue Blandan
Architecture: Dietrich Untertrifaller with Christian Zoméno
Competition: 2010, 1. prize
Construction: 2013 – 2016
Area: 8,590 m²
Programme: Lecture halls, workshops, offices and exhibition spaces for 320 students
Photos: Bruno Klomfar
Team
Ulrike Bale-Gabriel (Project management), Andreas Laimer
Text: Gerlinde Jüttner
Partners
Statics, building services, electrics, building physics: Artelia, Schiltigheim
Costs: Bessère, Toul
Acoustics: Venathec, Vandoevre-lès-Nancy
Master builder: Fayat Bâtiment Lorraine, Metz
Steel construction: Ateliers Bois et Cie, Chaumont
Cuboid and crystal, connected by glass
The ENSAD Art School forms the northern end of the ARTEM (ARt, TEchnology, Management) campus, the largest new university building in France. The art college houses all the rooms required for the three study programmes of art, design and communication, such as studios, workshops and classrooms, as well as spacious exhibition areas. The four-storey, elongated "Vauban" cuboid on the north-west side and the five-storey, crystalline-faceted “Signature” building on the south-east side enclose an inner courtyard with the two glazed link buildings.
The clear spatial organisation becomes evident as soon as you enter the building. The dark Signature building houses exhibition areas, administrative offices and a spacious skylight hall on the top floor. The workshops and studios are located in the lower Vauban building. An auditorium building partially raised from the ground closes off the inner courtyard at the rear and leads to the adjoining park.
The Signature building
The two structures are fundamentally different from each other on the outside: the multi-edged volume of the Signature building is completely encased in a perforated sheet façade made of dark, anodised aluminium. The windows are slightly offset storey by storey towards the street and gradually change in size towards the park. This irregular arrangement is partly the result of the different room heights, but also follows the logic of distorting the building into a crystalline form.
The Vauban building
The façade of the cuboid, elongated Vauban building is clad with slate-coloured, glass fibre-reinforced cement fibre panels and shows the regular structure of large-format, linearly arranged windows. The bay-like projecting window boxes lend the façade plasticity. Colourful felt curtains provide attractive colour accents on the inner courtyard side and improve the acoustics. Despite their different appearance, the load-bearing structure of the two buildings is identical: the workshop plateaus, which are divided by plasterboard walls, are freely spanned around a solid access core.
Inspiring interior design
Appearing very compact from the outside, the art school surprises on the inside with its spaciousness. Raw materials such as exposed concrete, steel, wood, expanded metal or wood-wool panels for sound absorption in well-lit rooms form a robust and stimulating background for artistic work. The different storey heights in both buildings ensure a varied spatial experience. They range from three and a half to four metres in the studio wing, where the photo studio even extends over two floors with an air space, to the six-metre-high skylight room in the attic of the Signature building.
The transparent structure, which connects the Signature and Vauban buildings, houses a two-storey entrance hall with a cafeteria on the upper floor.
We deliberately designed the access corridors on the courtyard side not as "corridors" or narrow "tubes", but as light-flooded, bright lounges that can also be adapted for exhibitions. They open onto the inner courtyard with large windows, whose deep glulam embrasures form attractive seating niches. Colourful felt curtains provide attractive accents on the inner courtyard side and improve the acoustics.
The master plan
Nicolas Michelin created the masterplan for the ARTEM campus on the site of the former Molitor barracks. A 300-metre-long gallery made of steel and glass acts as an interface to the city and connects the individual universities.
Completed in autumn 2016, the ENSAD interprets the specifications of the master plan in a unique way. In contrast to the other, rather colourful buildings, we chose an anthracite cladding that harmonises well with the slate roofs of the neighbouring barracks.
