Green gauge - Maison de l'Environnement, Belfort, France

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996 by Peter Blundell Jones

Lucien Kroll's little ecological interpretation centre at Belfort suggests to the future how an official building can be humanised, and a gentle programme be given appropriate monumentality.

Belfort lies in eastern France, in hilly country called the Ballon d'Alsace, close to the German border which was fought over for centuries. Visiting the old city centre, one can hardly overlook the extensive city fortifications which were not abandoned until the First World War, but one also senses that this troubled history has produced a local culture of vitality and independence. The city lies in a broad valley into which streams descend from the Vosges on one side and the Jura on the other, filling the lake of Malsaucy just to its north. Many centuries old, this lake is none the less an artificial creation. It once served as industrial power source, but now acts as a reservoir for the city and as a large local park and pleasure area. One end swarms with sunbathers, swimmers and wind surfers in summer, but the other is protected as an ecological zone. In between, as a gatehouse to the wildlife areas, the city authorities decided to set up an ecological centre, the Maison de l'Environnement, to act as a study base, educational facility and tourist attraction.

The idea of making the centre was first mooted in 1988, becoming officially accepted by the Conseil General in 1990. They decided to choose a design by limited competition, and selected four architectural practices on the basis of reputation and experience. The jury of January 1991 voted unanimously for Lucien Kroll's scheme, which seemed particularly appropriate and sympathetic to the site, for its half-submerged form made it less obtrusive than the others. The centre is run by a special association and has a permanent staff consisting of director, secretary, two 'animators' in charge of the educational programme - one dedicated to schools, the other to families - and two workers responsible for maintaining the site.

Kroll, participation and paysage

Kroll has always been concerned with green issues and the word paysage - landscape, but with reference to paysan, the inhabitant - has long been prominent in his vocabulary. For him architecture is always in a sense paysage - the modification of a landscape and of the relationships within it rather than the imposition of an object. He is best known for his radical experiments with participation and for his attempts to rehumanise some of the worst examples of modernist housing, but he and his wife Simone have also designed various wild and ecological gardens, trying always to discover and follow a natural order rather than imposing an alien one. He says that, 'The house is embedded in the hill because it is no simple provision of shelter: its architecture is rather demonstrative, illustrating a contemporary attitude to ecology. It addresses itself primarily to the sensibility of individuals, and more to their intuition than to their rationality. This is not merely a literary image: from the entrance (always the most sensitive place in architecture) it goes to the roots. Only after traversing a dark tunnel does one arrive at the exhibition room bathed in light and symbolically covered with three high-tech [episcopal] mitres.

'From without, rising beyond the mound which conceals the rest of the building, these three irregular pyramids signal the centre's presence from afar. Contemporary ecology is ecumenical, for rather than simply denying certain techniques and intelligences, it must try to reconcile the friendly natural forces that impinge on man with the friendly human artefacts that impinge on the environment. This ecology deals with man and with his surroundings at the same time. It is civilised yet complex: thus no place is the same as another, and there is none of that mindless repetition of modules that gave modernism a bad name: it is without doubt post-modern.

'The mitres sit on trees both natural and artificial: this shows a meeting of that which grows from the ground and that which men have added, without either negating the other. They flood the exhibition hall with light: a blue or leaden sky takes over, and one sees nothing else. Beyond, the little seminar room is quite closed and introverted: this is the deepest part of the complex. It is not Cartesian but envelops and facilitates communication through setting participants in oblique relationships where they can look across at each other, rather than in massed ranks. It makes them actors, not just listeners. The image is at home in technically induced comfort...

'All is organic, in curves, soft, oblique, mobile, always unexpected. And in three dimensions: the walls, ceilings and sometimes even the floors slope. For no kind of formal architecture can take account of ecology: the cold and authoritarian abstractions of recent modernists comprise quite another discourse. Here, we enracinate ourselves. The colours are as vegetal both in their tone and arrangement and in their material, for we avoided the use of chemical solvents.'