Exhibition Hall - "Palais populaire"
Award-winning project for the 10th edition of "Trophée Béton" ("Concrete Award") in 2022.
This competition project is a reinterpretation of Félix Candela's concrete structure for the Bacardi Rhum Factory built in Mexico in 1960. Starting originally from a hyperbolic paraboloid sectioned along two oblique planes, Candela simply associates 6 shells in reinforced concrete veil linked together at the top.
The special relationship to the ground developed by Candela with those shells coming together in lightness inspired me to create my own project, the result of a series of preparatory sketches, structural manipulations and model experiments.
The challenge I set to myself was to save at best the amount of concrete needed while covering a large free surface, in this case the space of an exhibition hall in the city center of Marseille. If the original structure required the concrete shells being poured on site, my project focuses on the use of prefabricated elements in ultra-high performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPC), allowing the fineness of each element but also their standardization to favor simplicity of implementation and material saving.
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