For the love of music!

Compiled by TeamIAnD

Photography: André Morin; courtesy v2com

Read Time: 2 mins 

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Electronic music is a new subject for architecture. Herault Arnod Architects invent a specific architectural system for a new type of spectacle for the city of Grenoble, France!

Most of the times electro nights take place in spaces that are not specially designed for them: clubs or night clubs, warehouses, fields, stadiums… For the Grenoble project, the aim has been to bridge this gap and establish a relationship with the public, whilst allowing concerts with a more traditional configuration.

 

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Built next to the Magasin, the Grenoble Centre for Contemporary Art, and installed in a hall built by the Eiffel workshops at the end of the 19th century, the historic fabric of the new concert hall lends it a character that is accentuated by its present design. 

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Conceived as a volume with five branches that gives equal importance to each of its sides, this multidirectional and autonomous shape frees itself from future developments, and there is no risk of its identity being weakened in the future.

 

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The architecture is rough and efficient, enveloped in a skin made of thick larch boards set at irregular intervals. The appearance of this timber gives the architecture a character that is part archetype, part hyper-modernity. This first layer allows a glimpse into the more mysterious world of the interior, playing surreptitiously with the juxtaposition of the wooden abstract and rough envelope and the façade of the hall with the light and transparent suspended curved glass curtain wall. Its curved plan gives the interior volume an organic aspect, reinforcing the contrast between the envelope and the body caught inside. The whole forms an organism with the concert hall as its heart, from where the other spaces are organized.

 

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The space is conceived so that during the concert each spectator can move and shift ambience as he/she pleases. The hall is designed like an asymmetric shell giving artists total freedom to use the space anyway they wish. Several platforms at different heights are provided for the DJs. Extending out from the hall, the “chill-out” is a calmer space, extended by balconies where people can go out to get some fresh air or smoke a cigarette during the concert.

 

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The entrance pavilions form two urban stage scenes. They are raised and the audience thus becomes part of a stage performance inside these frames and actors of the urban spectacle, blurring the classical distinction between actor and spectator.