On the edge: an idealistic language school sensitively intervenes between park and town, academia and community

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1997 by Emma Wiles

The Groupe Scolaire International is on a key site - just on the edge of the comprehensive development area which has allowed the centre of Lille to be radically altered to become the focus of northern France, and indeed the surrounding countries. Formally, it is a permeable interface between an inner suburb of the bustling new city and a beautiful park, landscaped in the English manner, which forms an apparently natural urban edge to the south. Socially, it is a centre for surrounding schools, offering language teaching, sports and dining facilities, while at the same time being an interface between the world of academia and the local community, in that the general-purpose hall and the language labs are open to the public. Its presence gives the rue E. Jacquet new life, and enhances the nature of the park.

Essentially, the building, by the Japanese/French practice Atelier Akahori of Paris, working with local architect J.C. Leriche, has been conceived as a portico to the park. Its main gesture is a long white beam of classrooms supported on slender two-storey-high pilotis. This frames the park from the street and, looking in reverse, acts as a formal propylaeum marking the beginning of the city from the grass and trees. In counterpoint to the pure long white floating streak are the more public spaces: the gymnasium and the restaurant, both of which project south towards the park clad in corrugated metal, and the general purpose hall, which pushes out on the street side, clad in the kind of diagonally arranged artificial slates which have become a modern vernacular cliche in this part of northern France. Here, at the east end of the composition, it seems that too many architects have been at work, each wanting a say in both materials and form, for the slate cladding projects over a partly corrugated clad floor which itself is perched on a brick base that rises to form a pierced screen between the school and the neighbouring three-storey housing block.

All this is presumably a fundamentally well-intentioned effort to break down the scale of the new building and make it relate to the grain of the suburb. But the handling of the floating white slab shows that all the fuss was probably unnecessary. From the street side, the scale is controlled by a very deft move that works well both inside and out. The corridor which runs along the whole length of the north side of the slab connecting the classrooms is made luminous and cheerful both by a continuous skylight and a long slot window at floor level that allows the children to look out downwards to the street and retain visual contact with the outside world, while giving them almost total privacy. Externally, the glass strip of this low level window serves to reduce the scale of the big portico and relate it to the neighbouring housing.

The student entrance is at the west end, tucked under the slab. From it rises the building's most exciting spatial move - a long dog-leg stepped ramp which gently takes you up to the top-lit corridor and simultaneously engages with the street. The luminous promenade leads to the serene classrooms with their delectable views south across the trees and lawns of the park. It seems a good place to grow up in.