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Les Olives design development
Visiting quarries in the South of France for the façade of Les Olives School in Marseille.
Les Olives, formerly a village, is now a residential neighbourhood in north-east Marseille. Here, a new school is being planned as part of the city’s “School Plan” to modernize facilities, accommodate growing student numbers, and support urban renewal. The site currently hosts a gym, a refectory, a caretaker’s lodge and a 1960s prefabricated school building. Rather than demolishing the latter, the proposal aims at reusing it as a large covered hall and playground, offering both shelter and privacy for the nursery area. The outdated gym will furthermore not be refurbished, but will serve as an open air playground for primary school students.
The new project is designed to optimise outdoor spaces, mark the entrance to the site and allow for construction phasing without modular installations on site.
The layout consists of three volumes, each dedicated to a specific use and connected by covered, external circulation routes. The architecture ultimately features load-bearing facades in cut stone and a mixed structure combining stone, wood, metal and concrete, following the principle of ‘the right material in the right place’.
video (1): ©XDGA