This is not the first major building to appear in the rapidly growing city over the past year: the city hall and design center of Jean Nouvel and the Massimiliano Fuksas School of Hotel Management were previously commissioned.
But Pierresvives is the most dramatic of the four. It houses three independent institutions - the archives, the library and the sports department of the Hérault department, whose capital is Montpellier. Since the building is intended to serve citizens, it received the "subtitle" "Knowledge and Sports Center for All".
But the name itself is much more interesting, although it continues this deliberately "humanistic" line. Pierresvives - words "living stones" merged into one, a fragment of the phrase of Francois Rabelais "I create living stones, that is, people" (Je ne bâtis que pierres vives, ce sont hommes) from the 3rd book of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
According to Hadid's idea, the building resembles a branching tree growing horizontally. The three institutions are vertically divided: below is the archive, which requires a minimum of windows, above is the library, where the glazing area is higher, and at the very top and side, in the "crown" of the tree, are the well-lit offices of sports officials.
The public areas of all three organizations are located on the ground floor behind the main façade, united by an elongated lobby with an exhibition space in the center. In addition, on the second floor there is a common corridor with the reading rooms of the archive and the library; the auditorium and meeting rooms, located in the console above the main entrance, also go there. This corridor is highlighted on the façade by a recessed glazing strip.
The rest of the building's spaces are clearly distributed among three "owners", each of which received its own node of vertical communications.
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