Honorable Mention: International Architecture Awards 2025
Precise Acts - Hermès Workshops | Louviers, France | 2023

Architects: Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture
Lead Architect: Lina Ghotmeh
Landscape Architects: Erik Dhont Landscape Architect
General Contractor: NGE Group
Client: Hermès International
Photographers: Iwan Baan

The first passive, energy-positive, and low-carbon industrial building in France.

This project emerges as a reflection on the history and values of Hermès with craft as a starting point and as the end point.

Before drawing a line, I carried out with my atelier multiple "excavations»: research on the history of this place, on the local resources, the particularities of this environment, of the ground of Normandy with its wet, clayey earth, ready to be modeled.

Built in artisanal bricks, this construction narrates the power of the hand. 500,000 bricks, made from the local earth only a few km from the site, structure the space, announcing both resistance and lightness. Carefully laid, by companions and master masons, they have allowed the updating of know-hows all while re-establishing an intimate, emotional link to building.

Structural, Fine, coupled, these bricks gallop along the building’s envelope, from span to span, they are orchestrated at 9 meters long intervals drawing a perfect square from face to face: the plan of this factory.

Like "an archeology of the future", this building literally emerges from the memory of its place, on the remains of a Magdalenian hearth attesting to the relationship between humans and their tools. It invites nature at its heart, drawing time between the lines of architecture and the sinuous landscape remodeled by the excavated earth of the site.

The lines lead to the entrance where one is embraced by an open courtyard. An oak tree centers the space and leads into the internal square: a meeting point, a gathering place of dialogue between artisans under the wooden spanning beams. Here the space is magnificently dressed by the work of the artist Emmanuel Saulnier seen suspended in this “plaza” with large needles interlacing in movement and tracing the galops of horses in a similar way to the arches dressing this building’s architecture. This movement also echoes the gestures of the hands at work, as crafts-makers handle colors, under the light bathing the large volumes of the different workshops.

Leather, earth, brick, wood, this building lives in synergy with nature. Bioclimatic, it takes what nature offers it without asking too much of it. Its energies are renewable and low carbon. It is a positive E4C2 building like all this human adventure. It proves that we can always do well and better thanks to our perseverance and the wise collaboration of disciplines.