Lot 8 is the renovation of a former nineteenth-century electrical depot draws its materials, almost entirely, from the few kilometres of southern France around it.
Arles sits where the Camargue wetlands meet the Alpilles and the stony Crau plain, and between them the clay in the ground, the limestone in the nearby quarries and the sunflower stalks left standing after harvest amount to most of what a building needs.
The Magasin Électrique is a 2,100-square-metre masonry shed built for the French railway company SNCF, one of the old industrial buildings in the Parc des Ateliers that the LUMA Foundation has been slowly turning into a cultural and research campus.
Completed in 2020, the renovation gives the depot over to Atelier LUMA, the foundation’s design research programme, which has worked from Arles since 2017. Inside are workshops for timber, metal, ceramic and textile, laboratories for algae and mycelium, a library and resource centre, and the desk and production space of a working studio.
“Through investigating the resources and know-how in our bioregion, and connecting different fields of expertise, Atelier LUMA develops local solutions for ecological, economic, and social transition.” The renovation, designed by BC architects & studies with Assemble and developed alongside Atelier LUMA and BC materials, is at once the home for that work and a compelling case for it: a flagship of bioregional design built, as far as the construction allowed, from the bioregion it stands in.
The original depot has been retained, with the limestone shell remaining. The tall industrial volume is left to read as what it was, and the metal roof trusses still carry the eye across the space like the railway infrastructure they are.
What the renovation has added is earth. The central agora of Bloc B is walled in rammed earth and compressed earth block, the horizontal striations of the rammed walls left exposed and unfinished as a recording of their own making. The clay comes from a local quarry; the rammed earth is reinforced with lime and finished with polished rammed-earth balustrades. Laminated timber is used in the beams, lintels and frames for the openings to carry the spans. Where the walls are raw earth brick, a steel reinforcement beam and timber take the load. The floors are a terrazzo cast from the building’s own reclaimed roof tiles, broken, set and polished back into a surface that keeps its original colour.
The interior plaster reads like an inventory of the surrounding fields. Earth plaster has been applied over an adhesion layer of canne de Provence, the giant reed that grows through the Camargue, with sunflower-fibre panelling left from the harvest and insulation of rice straw-bale blocks behind it. Algae, the subject of one of the building’s own laboratories, turns up as a stain in plaster prototypes – a pigment drawn from water. The earth plaster also adds an acoustic layer, softening the hard industrial volume.
None of this is the fastest or cheapest way to line a wall. Earth construction is labour-intensive and asks for reinforcement that conventional framing wouldn’t, and the palette depends on knowledge that has to be found, taught and kept. But that’s what adds to its beauty. The materials have barely travelled to get to the site, and carry almost no processing. They can return to the ground at the end of their life, and the act of sourcing and making them locally is itself the essence of Atelier LUMA. The clay quarry, the Sarragan limestone, the sunflower field and the reed beds are not a supply chain so much as a catchment.
Outside, a garden of regional planting completes the design story, developed by a long roster of growers, dyers and ecologists. Lot 8 reads, in the end, as a working proposition: that a building can be made, in large part, from the ground it occupies, and that doing so is a discipline rather than a nostalgia – the discipline of building with what a place already holds.
Credits
Architecture: Assemble + BC architects & studies
Local architect: ODA
Material development: Atelier LUMA + BC materials
Bioclimatic concept: SYNEFF Consult
Structure and HVAC: Betrec
Contractors: Atelier Kara, La Pierre au Carré, Leemniscaat, Menuiserie Corrèze, Tanzi, CVI, Guintoli, Novacier, Calvo, Fernandez & Fils, CKAT, Le Village, Tonello
Interior elements: atelier blam, Lukas Wegwerth, Établissement Brissaud, Association Le Village, Plâtre Vieujot, Atech, CSTB, CTTM, Ets Carré Construction site companies Tanzi, Guintoli NGE, Atelier Kara, SCOP La Pierre au Carré, Brique Technique Concept, Rachid Mizrahi, Novacier, Menuiserie Corrèze, CKAT Aménagement, CVI, CLP, Calvo, SNEF, SARL Fernandez & Fils, Het Leemniscaat, Briseno, Tonello, Citynox, Apte, Associati
Building labelling: Envirobat BDM, Scop DOMENE, Estenea, Adret, TERAO
Garden: Chris Posma SYNEFF Consult, COLDEP, TPF-I, Marie Marquet, Florent Valentin, Dominique Cardon, Véronique Mure, Genre, Agence PAYSAGE
