Lycée Simone Veil, Wooden High School, Southern France Building Project, French Architecture Photos
Lycée Simone Veil High School in Gignac
7 Mar 2022
Design: Hellin Sebbag Architectes
Location: Avenue Arnaud Beltrame, 34150 Gignac, Hérault, France

Photos: Julien Thomazo
Lycée Simone Veil, France
Located at the foot of the Gignac hill in the Herald valley, the Lycée Simone Veil takes its dominant colours from the rural landscape ? the blue and green shades of the vines and foothills of the Haut-Languedoc massif in the distance.

The roofs of the lowest buildings are gardens with gentle curves – valleys and hills – as if the ground has risen to the roofs, moulding them into free forms that provide the school with a ?green heart?.
With a Bâtiment à Energie POSitive (BEPOS – building produces more energy than it consumes) objective, the programme generated a legible layout around a courtyard surrounded by the two 3-storey north-south oriented teaching blocks and buildings with atypical functions – the east-west oriented Documentation Centre and canteen. The parallelogram form of the courtyard results from the superimposition of the access road and north-south building orientation.

Due to the differing volumes, it generates spaces with distinct functions, while enabling for optimal surveillance. Independent of the educational facility, the boarding school and staff accommodation are located outside the courtyard, opposite the sports field.

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