The project has four objectives: to take advantage of everything in the original building that can still be of use, and discard everything not reusable; to formulate a strategy of intervention identifying those indispensable actions – of a more conservationist or more additive nature – that would make it possible to recover and enhance the usability of all the spaces; to establish a dialogue with the context; and to draw up a sustainable proposal that involves preexisting elements and new installations at once.
The program is organized in three volumes connected by an atrium: a main one harboring the auditorium and the old store, which are the two principal spaces; a central volume; and the only one with no direct access from the street, forming an L with the other two. The atrium presents a successions of voids in which one can discern physical traces of the building’s life. This succession of voids is something like an interior street connecting the three volumes and all the halls, in a progression from most public to most private areas.
Because the old roofs could not be reused, a new one was built, covering the entire building but broken up into three light pitched roofs corresponding to the three structural volumes.