Twenty-three FRACs - Regional Fund for Contemporary Art - were created in France in the early 1980s: they buy works and use them for educational purposes - for organizing exhibitions on their own and third-party sites and for leasing to public institutions, which is also a form exposure. The FRAC building designed by Kengo Koum opened in Marseille this summer, and the North-Pas-de-Calais Foundation, based in Dunkirk on the Belgian border, has now received its new headquarters.
The new building is located very close to the beach. Its base is a boathouse 35 meters high, built in 1949 and nicknamed by the locals "cathedral". When a competition was held for the FRAC project in 2009, the customers expected a more or less traditional reconstruction from the participants, but the winners, Lacaton & Vassal, wished to keep the “temple” interior of the boathouse intact, and place the storerooms, employees' offices and the educational center in the adjacent “twin »The same dimensions.
The boathouse has now been turned into a covered "city square", always open to everyone during the day. It is designed for large exhibitions and installations, concerts, performances and even digital performances - sponsored by FRAC or third-party organizers. The Turbine Hall of the London Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron was the model for the authors of the project.
The decision to "double" the boathouse, it would seem, should deplorably affect the budget, but the architects, using the cheapest building materials and standard details, spent only 12 million from the initial budget of 12.8 million euros. The outer layer of the facade of the new building is corrugated polycarbonate slabs, some of which can be pushed apart like shutters. Therefore, the building seems translucent, although in fact, part of the inner layer of the facade is made of sandwich panels: behind it are hidden storage rooms where daylight is not needed. The rest of the areas are glazed.
The new building cuts along the "inner street": in the future it will become a continuation of the route from the beach, which attracts masses of tourists in summer. And in the upper part of the building there is a "belvedere": a space without a definite program, from where the surroundings can be seen through the ETFE membrane.
Lacaton & Vassal, the authors of the resource-efficient reconstruction of a residential tower on the outskirts of Paris, also thought about the "green" side here: although polycarbonate will have to be changed in 20 years due to humid sea air, it will provide a temperature in the interior 7 degrees higher than usual glazing or ETFE - and this is important in the cool climate of Dunkirk.
