In Nyon, the Weissenburger School Group’s material qualities reflect its nearby environment and traditional building practices used on the site. These façades are composed of traditional red brick. They are an efficient thermal complex enhancing the exterior insulation. The roofing is natural slate, echoing the roofs of the mansions of the bourgeoisie in the historic centre.
The placement of Saint-Exupéry School Group resulted in two buildings designed with simple shapes. The material qualities of the project enhance its streamlined contours; as with the Weissenburger site, the local material of brick is used. It is laid with the dry joint technique to underscore the idea of a homogeneous surface and to lessen the impact of its laying plan. In order to differentiate the two schools, the nursery school is built with brown coloured brick and the primary school with red coloured brick. The colours of the tile roofing correspond to each school’s brick walls.
Each school possesses an exterior courtyard and an interior courtyard or patio. These courtyards open toward the town centre, toward the public space of the city blocks core. The nursery school benefits from an interior courtyard composed of mounds entirely covered with a soft, flexible ground conducive to endless combinations of games. The primary school has an opportunity to integrate in its teaching the discovery of the plants and caring for a vegetable garden, thanks to the patio consisting of a permanent garden full of scented plants as well as gardens for experimentation.
The layout and orientation of the built volumes form courtyards in the cores of city blocks, nestled between the façades and the vegetation marking their limits. These courtyards are large play areas offering different ambiances designed to inspire the imagination and creativity; a mineral one punctuated by games and designs on the ground, green courtyard with benches for moments of calm, outdoor theatre.
Common areas are lit with natural light to make them more inviting. On the Weissenburger site, the schools were laid out around a central patio. Its surrounding circulations are thus bathed in natural light. In the Saint-Exupéry school group, the linear circulations are mostly glazed the length of the schoolyard and systematically equipped with a glass door at their far end.
The key mission of the teaching clinic, the Fondation Santé des Étudiants de France (FSEF) in Vitry-le-François, is to enable ill young people, suffering from severe psychiatric issues, to benefit from medical attention while also having the possibility to effectively pursue their university education or their schooling.
It was important that the project manage to avoid giving off the image of a building assimilated with its specific function, like that of a hospital and a psychiatric institution, but rather that it more closely resembles a neighbourhood facility. Thus, the scale and height proposed are those of a two level building. This arrangement makes it possible to propose a volume coherent with the surrounding houses and dwellings as well as with the main building on the hospital campus.
During a reading of the programme, it became apparent that the notion of a landscaped courtyard would be an important and structuring one that could become the heart of the project. This area had to make it possible to organise all the functions therefore had to occupy a central position in the project, like a town square, around which the life of the whole town gravitates. To structure this place and define its limits, two new buildings forming two right angles were positioned so as to encompass two existing cedar trees in the project. Echoing typical urban squares in the region, physical and visual perspective were kept along a major diagonal allowing it to penetrate through the southwest and into the heart of the project.