Charles  Hesters, HEMAA architectes, France 

Charles Hesters and Pierre Martin-Saint-Etienne, place context at the center of their approach. The specificity of Hemaa lies not in this attention, but in the way it informs their architecture and influences the development of the project. The physical situation of the site is matched by the conceptual position of the proposal, which reconfigures, rethinks, and reinvents the place through a series of questions that serve as a safeguard.

What scale of building to fit into the context? What material expresses a local anchorage? How to amplify the use and keep a constructive quality? From the sum of these questions, an agile, flexible project emerges, dividing the program between different entities, different volumes. In this process of segmentation, the void takes on the importance of the full, the hollows, the interstices invite to inhabit the site as much as the built volumes.

The specifications of the competition are reviewed in light of the site even before the first sketches. A careful examination of the regulations and the topography prepares the reconfiguration of the public space by the project. For Hemaa, the benefits of an operation are not limited to its parcel. In two words, the restitution of a public void by the private volumes.

Project 1 | Project 2 | Project 3