Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine

The box Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Limoges

This regional arts center (FRAC) is moving to new premises-a nineteenth-century glass-ceilinged industrial shed that used to house a printworks, located in the city center. The main challenge for the architects was to reveal the nature of the historic building while at the same time creating a background for the artworks. This was, in their words, "a humbling exercise in pulling back"-without, however, being too enchanted by the past, since ultimately the project is intended as a space for contemporary art. Besides stripping the building down to its original state, the scheme involved a series of lightweight interventions. One of the programmatic components of the FRAC is the Artothèque, or lending library for contemporary art, based on the idea that a work of art, like a library book, can be taken out for a period of time and then returned. A system of sliding partitions provides a simple but efficient setting for the Artothèque. Another component is the "immersive box," a custom-designed gallery space for showcasing digital art. It is designed as a stack of two wooden enclosures-a light box and a black box-that can be closed for full immersion, partially folded out to merge with the bigger space, or completely folded up. When open, the structure forms a pitched roof echoing that of the former industrial building a spontaneously created ambiguity generated by a little house placed inside a much larger one. The top floor-a gallery overlooking the central nave-accommodates offices behind newly installed plywood partitions. The rest of the building has walls in the form of white boxes. The exhibition space is extended into the city by means of a new street façade fitted with a steel matrix to become a new form of representation by bringing art into a public space.

Completed in 2024

Client Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Programme Temporary exhibition space, art library, café-lecture

Team Batiserf, Nicolas, Forgue, Lamoureux, Ducks Sceno, Polytec, Spirale

Photos : Roland Halbe