It consists of two parts - the Silver Square, which celebrates the best building built in the country over the past year, and the First Work Prize, which is awarded to young architects for the first completed project.
The 2006 Silver Square was awarded to the architect Franck Hammoutène for his reconstruction of the Marseille City Hall complex, and the Périphériques architectes bureau received a special mention for the new building of the Pierre and Marie Curie University on the Paris campus Jussier and Dietmar Feichtinger [Jussier and Dietmar Feichtinger] behind the pedestrian bridge of Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.
Rémi Pascal and Pierre Bouillon (workshop Agence rppb) received the First Work Prize for the renovation of a residential building in Fleury-les-Aubray.
Frank Ammuten's victory this year is interesting because his construction is a building without a facade. The employees of the city hall of the city of Marseille did not have enough space in the old building of the 17th century, and they decided to use the unoccupied plot located next to their possessions: it was there, underground, that the new meeting room of the deputies of the municipal assembly with a spacious foyer was located. Equipped with the latest technology, it is designed for 300 people. High acoustics qualities are combined in it with thorough sound insulation, which protects the hall from noise and vibrations from the area above it.
The foyer next to it is planned to be used during the breaks between sessions of the meeting as an exhibition space available to all citizens. But this is not the only aspect of the reconstruction that benefits the residents of Marseille: instead of a vacant lot between the town hall and the Old Port, a spacious esplanade appeared above the new underground halls, using the elevation difference between the embankment and the Hotel Dieu hospital. Its wide steps, paved with granite slabs, form a wonderful resting place for the townspeople and a unique urban ensemble.
The Simone de Beauvoir Bridge, which received an “incentive prize”, deserves a separate mention. It is 37th in Paris, the city with the largest number of bridges across a single river. Its design is a cross between a conventional single-arch bridge and a hinged structure: the bridge consists of two mirrored arches.
Crossing the Seine in one of the widest places, it recalls, according to the Austrian architect Dietmar Feichtinger, Simone de Beauvoir with its modernity and its femininity, and its literary vocation is indicated by the fact that it leads to the National Library.
