IT'S Architecture has completed Mokuzai, an office building and an establishment offering public health services, with a mixed structure of wood and concrete, in the Belvédère ZAC (joint development zone) in Bordeaux.
Mokuzai is a genuine gateway to the Belvédère district and to the city of Bordeaux. Its particular situation requires that the building have several main façades. The northeast façade, on the Impasse Tregey, welcomes the flows entering the district and thus the city; the north façade opens onto the Boulevard Joliot-Curie with the main access to the building; finally, the south façade welcomes pedestrians arriving from the Parc Eiffel. Thus, all the façades have equal importance in relation to the city, and Mokuzai has been adapted to these different points of view.
The roof, visible from neighbouring buildings, becomes a fifth façade, which explains the decision to break the surface into sections with planted terraces. With Mokuzai, the focus is on quality and continuity in the landscape and on different scales and levels, from the public space to the roof.
The building is environmentally innovative thanks to its mixed structure of wood and concrete; innovative owing to its off-site construction process; and innovative in its system of articulated relations with the city and landscape. The porous ground floor on the boulevard, creates a visual and functional continuity between interior and exterior. Mokuzai’s architecture must be evaluated on its ability to contribute to developing the city.
Details are a humanising element of the architecture. The building reinterprets materials of this city of stone and enhances them through delicate work on the vertical decorative elements. The pilasters on the façade vary in form and dimension: larger on the ground floor (a “giant” order) and gradually thinner on the upper floors. The design of the façades participates in the quest for an idea of grace specific to this city.
But it is on the load-bearing façade composed of prefabricated concrete that the architects have concentrated their research. The level of detail, decoration and formal variation of the pilasters, cornices and the apron wall would not have been possible without the development of prefabrication, which enabled among other things, the considerable shortening of timeframes in the construction of the façades, particularly complex in the case of Mokuzai because of its volumetric articulation.
Rethinking workplaces according to the principles of emotional ecology
The noun Mokuzai — wood in Japanese — refers not only to the material, but also to a culture of construction in which the presence of nature is an essential condition of the wellbeing of its inhabitants, in accordance with the principles of biophilic design, which guided the project. It is a building where the ecological approach is not limited to technological and bioclimatic choices in that it expresses the emotional relationship between the people and the space.
Each design decision takes the wellbeing of its inhabitants as its yardstick. In this, the programme implemented in the building’s design — the headquarters of the MSA — enhances this meaning. Mokuzai is a manifesto that expresses the rapport between nature, care and the wellbeing of people.
From the functional viewpoint, the building houses on the ground floor a series of services related to the healthcare of members of the MSA fund: doctors’ offices, and reassuring spaces of sociability. “Medical” functions are organised around a great, double-height lobby, with clear separations and areas that can be semi-privatized thanks to a system of light partitions.
The lobby was designed as a genuine public space. The high proportion of glazed surfaces creates the interplay of views from the first two levels of the building; the wood cladding contributes to the warmth of the lobby, which serves as a welcoming space for human interaction and sociability.
The other levels of the building house offices of MSA employees. As is the case for the first two floors, office areas in Mokuzai are designed as spaces for sharing and social interaction thanks to the presence of loggias and green terraces on every level. Greenery is not decorative, but rather a presence, made possible by a system of planters with a depth of over one meter and planted with large trees.
The relation between interior and exterior is one of the organizing principles of spaces, and the rapport with the city and vegetation at every scale is very powerful. Thanks to its volumetric articulation and heights reached, the building provides all work areas with unique, newly revealed views overlooking the region of Bordeaux. The vegetation, also selected according to its ecologic value, turns each terrace into a fragment of urban habitat and a material contribution to the biodiversity of the city.
