Established in the town of Anières since 1957, the Chevrens Center is deigned to welcome and meet the educational needs of adolescnets aged 14 to 18 placed in boarding schools.
At the entrance to the village of Chevrens – Anières, the new constructions of the guidelines of the existing fabric, notably by strengthening the single-fronted structure of the village-street with an irregular succession of courtyards and narrows. Like this, the location of the project defines an ensemble built around a courtyard open to the road and this marks the transition between the countryside and the built environment.
Around the courtyard, two separate volumes share the main functions of the institution. A double building, with an administrative level and two living levels, serves as a living space for young people and supervisory staff. The second volume, closer to the road and lower than the other, is devoted to training. Yet defined as a unit, the two volumes are deliberately distinguished from each other in order to identify them by their uses: a place to live and a place to work.
The facades of the buildings are inspired by the place. If those of the dwellings of the hamlet are mainly in masonry, those of the large farms located at the entrances and exits of Chevrens and the neighboring villages are in traditional wooden cladding. The project combines these two principles by proposing to use traditional wooden facades as formwork bottoms for reinforced concrete facades. If all raw concrete negotiates with the question of the footprint of the formwork, here this phenomenon is taken to its climax so that the box takes on the appearance of the formwork. At first glance, these are wooden rural houses, but as you approach you discover that the whole is made of concrete. This transfer of traditional construction principles to shuttering and architectural form reminds us of the magic of a fossilized plant. The location and the materiality of the new intervention suggest that it has always been part of the Chevrens landscape.
