Local roots and emphasis on public life. "La Tuilerie" Cultural Centre by Ferrier Marchetti

Project description by Ferrier Marchetti Studio

The project involved the transformation of an industrial site in the small town of Limoux in the Aude department, and at the heart of a community of municipalities with 30,000 inhabitants. It is a threshold town between urban and rural, a situation that exemplifies the future of regions that have been left behind by major economic trends.

The social and economic history of the town centred throughout the 20th century on viticulture as well as two factories: the Myrys– Bata shoe factory, now gone, and a prosperous tile factory, which moved elsewhere in the region at the end of the1980s.

Though abandoned, the tile factory continued to live on in the collective imagination: it is a familiar landmark, keeping alive a social memory.

Faced with its abandonment, the community of municipalities chose to acquire the ensemble and to undertake its reconversion into a cultural centre. It was a major challenge for a city struggling to maintain shops, services, and attractiveness.

To take into account the limited means of a small community, the brief relied on mutualising investments, which resulted in a mixed-use facility.

It groups the media library, the conservatory of music, and the headquarters for the community of municipalities, which were previously dispersed among older, poorly adapted buildings.

Added to this ensemble is the creation of a media hall with seating for 2,000.

The project has strengthened the attraction of the music conservatory, already experiencing solid growth, and enhanced local cultural independence, and the influence of the jazz festival and the theatre season.

The local anchoring and the emphasis on public life have engendered a new public square onto which all the building’sentrances open. Open to the city and towards the promenade along the river, the centre is a place that amplifies this architectural commission into an urban project. It creates the conditions for a pause for sharing activities, waiting, encounters, and social ties between generations.

The difficult economic context meant that the project was built over a 10-year period, in a continuous effort of optimisation. The guiding principle was sobriety of means, i.e., to mutualise, do more with less, use only materials from the catalogue that resonate with the strategy of availability emphasised by the architects. This made it possible to respect the tight budget and echo the utilitarian aesthetic of industrial projects.

Added to this is the innovative peristyle, made of a net of hanging tiles, in homage to the know-how of everyone who worked here. It surrounds the place and duplicates the buildings through an openwork threshold that comes alive with sunshine as well as lighting.