VIVRE SA VILLE

She won the 2015 ArchiCOTE competition's Student Project Prize for her landscape interpretation centre. Focus on a new-generation architect with promising talent.

Undertaken as her graduate assignment after five years studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Marseille, Maillane Bro's project is essentially the result of her exploration of key architectural notions. The area where she was asked to work stands between the town of Menton and the little Italian village of Latte, at the point where the Alps seem to collapse into the sea. "The scenery changes abruptly after crossing the border into Italy," she points out. "It becomes an agricultural landscape sculpted by terracing, looking like Menton must have in the past, before the tourism boom and property speculation." Investigating the area sandwiched between looming mountains and endless Mediterranean, Bro discovered a wind-sculpted rocky outcrop near the village of Grimaldi. It caught her imagination and jolted her mind into action, inspiring the idea of a landscape interpretation centre there. "During my studies I chose a speciality that concentrated on places, materials and working with models, all of which were determining factors in this assignment."

Landscape and its preservation
Maillane Bro believes architecture should communicate the excitement one feels before the spectacle of the world. "I started by working on volume with a model, then moved on to two-dimensional drawings. My idea was to create something like a new bit of mountain." Seeking a correlation between construction and site, she came up with a pure, simple, geometrical shape for the centre intended to house research facilities and exhibitions, an orderly and ordering construction on the 'prow' of the headland. She then rapidly imagined a larger complex that would additionally provide accommodation, artists' studios and visitor parking in a nearby defunct quarry. Influenced by the topography, these two components create a new land­scape layout, a reinvented environment in which diverse people can come together to offer multiple visions of the Mediterranean.

Calm, stability and light
"A feature of my work is the particular attention I pay to accesses," Bro explains. Both components of her project employ essentially horizontal and vertical concepts, and the two are linked by a pedestrian circuit. The whole place is in fact designed to be explored on foot, with a structured sequence of views and a shelter created out of every corner protected from the sun. Making excellent use of light and shade, solidity and emptiness on this outcrop of land fashioned by the ages, Bro offers a new temporality for our speed-fixated society. Her architecture points up the contrasts between the hard organic rock, the vast expanse of sea and the immense sky, the building blocks of a project inspired by the site's identifying features and creating a strong connection between humans and nature.