Refurbishment and Restore Issue 20 2020 | Page 33

extension of the public space. From this mineral thickness, the floor emerges among the two new courtrooms, fully clad in a metal “drape” consisting of perforated stainless steel folded sheets. Between the two, air, emptiness and transparency on the Scarpe and the Pollinchove Palace, former parliament of Flanders in 1714. The volume of the new courtrooms is the privileged place of judicial dramaturgy. We wanted to bathe them with light, managing to surround them with glazing on their perimeter. The main idea is to highlight this sensation of progressive discovery and earthly anchorage of this mineral court of justice. Placed in order to preserve the confidentiality, the windows allow nevertheless to make present the external reality in order to prohibit the theatrical simulation or the anxiety related to the dark rooms where the litigant could feel condemned before even being judged. The floor of the Salle des pas perdus, a metaphor for a natural landscape dug by the water, reveals a wealth hidden in its base. Two worlds coexist the one above and the one below. Two universes and two materialities, the mineral and the metallic, the smooth and the pleated, the matt and the brilliant. This duality puts in tension voids, hollows and offers great spatial quality. The staging of the river and wants to make this Palace its exceptional character by placing in its heart its natural and built heritage that represents the Scarpe and Pollinchove Palace. Our project was finally built in response to the surrounding landscape. It is the revealer, the crossroads of the various constituent elements of the site. This staging of a rational and very precise approach of the uses in all the dimensions of the project generates a building born from the hybridization of all the urban and programmatic parameters. A point of contact and exchange... a real public building. www.hamonic-masson.com The section thus set up tells the main idea of ​​the project. A true horizontal break, the new building lifts and visually links the elements of the program with the surrounding environment and sculpts the void to revitalize the public space. The mineral base, a real urban anchorage on the ground of the city, comes to enclose the buildings and installs coherence between the extension and the existing one. This “active stand”, which includes the existing building, allows to accompany the pedestrian and thus define a human scale. The hall of lost steps is a direct visual www.refurbandrestore.co.uk - 33