A Concert Hall on top of a Former Seventeenth Century Convent in Northern France

Jul 16

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The convent of the Penitents in Louviers, Normandy, has served a variety of uses over the years and has housed a church, a prison and a tribunal court, but was converted into a music school in 1990. The project aimed to display a new image of the place and to shed its prison characteristics. The project of the New Musical School of Louviers in the convent of the Penitents – 24 classrooms, a score library and two big orchestra rooms- was raising a certain problematic in term of rehabilitation because of a heavy program implicating substantial interventions: the contemporary extensions have become more important than the existing building. The result is a compact project where the new parts dominate the ancient elements; however, the historical construction is still governing. This is an ‘intimate’ program within each task requires isolation and concentration and will adapt to the compact and intimate character of the project.