Amplifying Toulouse’s urban forms: converting an industrial wind tunnel into a museum dedicated to street art

At the heart of the Guillaumet Planned Development Zone, the former wind tunnel of the Toulouse Aeronautical Testing Centre asserts its presence: an extraordinary scale, an intact industrial heritage, a rare spatial power. The project does not seek to erase this history — it extends and amplifies it. 

A brick plinth anchors the whole within the architectural vocabulary of Toulouse, while the museum building rise above, slightly rotated on its axis, as if in tension with Alger street. Here, the material is as much a gesture as it is a choice: gabions made of recycled crushed concrete from the demolished site form a façade that expresses both the memory of the site and the imperative of reuse. Between the volumes, a carefully composed totem of brick and concrete blocks — where craftsmanship meets the sensibility of street art — marks the entrance to the Planned Development Zone. A museum that practices what it exhibits.