Lancy Community Center

Location: Lancy (Switzerland)
Area: 850 m² (9.149 SF)
Date: 2013
Client: Ville de Lancy
Structure: Arnaud Delugeard
Facade consultant: Techne
Status: Unbuilt

This community center near Geneva was designed so as to offer no hierarchy of facades. A cylindrical shaped building with over sized window openings on each floor as well as a cylindrical shaped inner courtyard on the second floor for natural ventilation. The design intent was to strongly stress the building’s program: open to all.

The shape itself helps the building become a familiar object in the neighborhood, one that responds to the site itself where a curved road curls around the site. A large gathering room opens to two separate courtyards on the ground floor, studios are all on upper floors. A self insulating (cast in place) concrete allowed for both interior and exterior faces of the building to be exposed concrete, smooth to the inside, vertically etched to the outside so as to refer to the former stone quarries on the very same site.