Rehabilitation of Château d'Aigues
Publication Prix Wilmotte
The Château de la Tour d’Aigues is an architectural palimpsest that symbolizes the cultural richness of the Provencal countryside. Our project, «Orto d’escoundoun», in Provençal, is the expression of this history contained within the walls of the castle: to highlight the intimate relationship between the castle and its territory, incarnated in our project thread: «Slow Food». This reactionary movement, born in Italy in the face of the emergence of fast food in the 1980s, advocates the intrinsic values of the territory, the local identity, the tangible and intangible heritage, the know-how and its transmission. Our aim is to offer a responsible and innovative experience: a journey that involves the local culture of the product, its processing, its tasting and the transmission of a heritage. This philosophy, in which respect for the «already there» is associated with a second strong desire that emerged from our visit to the site: to think through the void.
The courtyard of the castle is a key space, outlining the stone enclosures. It is a vital respiration of the project, which we translate into a new design of the ground and a work of digging. It is not a question of adding elements, but of extracting the essence of the existing and revealing its character.
Team: Manon Darde, Arthur Rundstadler, Thomas Lagourgue
