The Mayac middle school joins in the landscape of the neighborhood of the city of Uzès. The site is a new zone of activity which, at first sight, does not reveal particular specificity except a strong slope of the ground. Such will be the point of stick of the setting-up. The project is going to use the topography of the site and to join this slope. it articulates along a long passageway, originating in the high point of the ground, and develops until register in its continuity the housing of the teachers. Beyond the structure given to this presence we granted a particular care to the quality of the internal and foreign spaces.
There or nothing preexists, a place of life has to take place. While taking into account the present major objectives in this project, namely the capacity to offer to the pupils, professors and users a functional workplace, one of the stakes in this construction is to give coherence to the middle school by offering places of meetings convenient to the exchanges. Our first action was to rethink this current landscape, to bring a feature to the foreign arrangements which have to convey real spatial qualities. It is a global work on the plot of land. A reflection at the level of the territory, even if the treatment remains included in the scope of intervention.
The middle school must be considered as real living area, because numerous persons are going to evolve in its surrounding wall for at least four years for the pupils, and much more for the teaching and administrative profession. It so presents an easy and reassuring access for the pupils, because the middle school plays an essential role of place of sociability and meeting. Besides, the geography of places is there easily to dread, the access is in direct connection with the hall and the court, to propose an accompaniment of the pupils at the hours of comeback and brought out of classes. Its functioning proposes a big brightness in the distribution to all the buildings.
We worked with a relatively low building (R+1) organized on a central axis which follows the slope of the ground. The project joins on the whole of the site. The passageway is of use as vertebral column to the project, the various spaces hang on to it perpendicularly. The organization offers a big flexibility of use and a variety of spaces which generate hierarchies within the building. Every educational entity is individualized and positioned according to its requirements. The progress begins with a building including the administration (positioned at the same time as the passageway), then in the North of the passageway are localized the rooms of education. Every group of rooms is treated as a "block" possessing its own entrance, served or directly by the court or in the floor by the passageway. This arrangement, in comb, in for advantage not to dilute the useful surface and the endless corridors while moving closer to classrooms. Furthermore, rooms possess a whole direct view on the intermediate gardens. In the South, opening on the court, at the first level take place the staff room, the CDI and the rooms of art educations. In RDC, sheltered under these composed volumes on piles come to find accommodation the places of life clean for the pupils with, the cafeteria, the center of the student life. The court as for her is blocked in the space by the presence of the pole restoration which protects it from parking lots on the back. This position allows to direct the room of restoration to the court and to turn all the activities connected to the kitchen towards the way of back sideboard.
Always by respecting this notion of existing topography, the court follows the curves of the ground and decomposes into three spaces with differences of levels treated by emmarchements. Every level will be in connection with the covered gallery and activities can be attributed there, while keeping nearness with the supervisors. A long wall positioned in the North, allows protecting the covered gallery and the court of winds and bad weather. This one is drilled by geometrical forms allowing a contribution of light. So, it is of real foreign appropriable spaces that take place in various places of the middle school. This scale of project, was for us important to propose to the pupils of the differentiated spaces, and maybe make them become aware of the wealth which gets such a variety.
