Caserne De La Benauge

Project description

The conversion of the Benauge fire station site, listed as a Historic Monument, will restore the original work of Claude Ferret, an emblematic example of the Modern Movement. The Benauge fire station will become a new structuring site accessible to the public. A hybrid space open to the city, combining culture, gastronomy, hospitality and living.

In 1954, Claude Ferret, accompanied In 1954, Claude Ferret, along with Adrien Courtois and Yves Salier, completed the first phase of the construction of the Benauge Fire Station. It included the garages, 40 apartments for the firefighters and their families, an administrative wing, and the drying tower with its porch overlooking the service yard. In 1963, Claude Ferret completed the second phase, which added 26 additional apartments in a single-story building following the curved alignment of the new Rue de la Benauge.

Located on the right bank of the Garonne River, at the end of the Pont de Pierre, the Benauge Barracks is situated along the right bank of the Garonne on the strategic site of the former Gare d’Orléans. Facing the “City of Stone,” the barracks embody the post-war renewal vision that Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Mayor of Bordeaux and Resistance hero, sought to implement, as well as the thirst for modernity of these young architects of the 1950s.

Today, the Benauge Barracks is an iconic landmark in the urban landscape of Bordeaux. Its unique architecture stands out for its integration of the principles of the Modernist Movement, of which it is one of the few Bordeaux examples, alongside the Salle des Fêtes du Grand Parc, also designed by Claude Ferret, and the Cité Frugès by Le Corbusier.

The Benauge Barracks is a French model of functionalist architecture, implementing the architectural principles of the Bauhaus School. The form and composition of the various buildings correspond directly to their function and to the coexistence of the workplace for firefighters and the living spaces for their families. It consists of four functional entities, each corresponding to a volume:

• The garages,
• The administrative wing,
• The apartments,
• The training and drying tower for fire hoses.

These four entities are connected through a system of vertical and horizontal communication, which is a central element of the project in terms of fluidity and efficiency. The system includes four spiral staircases, each wrapped around an elevator that connects the five floors of the apartments. These staircases lead to a large, open-air walkway at the first floor level, which serves the garages and the administrative wing.

Firefighters can thus descend directly from their apartments to their trucks using the “masts” located at the base of the four main vertical circulation shafts. The vehicle flow organization respects a “forward march”: returning from interventions through the archway on Rue de la Benauge, cleaning the vehicles in the service yard with hose drying in the tower, followed by passing under the four hovering staircases to park the trucks in the garages, ready for the next intervention.

Although the work of Claude Ferret is more influenced by the Brazilian school of Oscar Niemeyer than by Le Corbusier, the structural design of the barracks, with its post-and-beam system, integrates Le Corbusier’s five points of modern architecture. The housing building facing the Garonne is composed of five levels, topped by a terrace roof. It is raised on tall pilotis, hovering above the ground floor and first floor, which house the garages and the administrative wing.

The post-and-beam system allows for a free plan with no load-bearing walls, as well as free facades, including the iconic Garonne-facing facade, which unfortunately no longer remains today. This facade is made of steel double-leaf doors giving access to the continuous balconies, and prefabricated vertical aluminum panels in “corsair red,” featuring portholes or skylights with inverted sliding shutters that move invisibly within the slightly convex lower part of each panel.

The garage facade opens almost entirely towards the Quai Deschamps and the service yard with monumental 5-meter-wide double-leaf pivot doors. They are made of a steel structure with ribbed sheet metal incorporating portholes on the Garonne side, and corrugated metal on the yard side.

At the center of the service yard, the Drying Tower, 32 meters in height, is a landmark in the large Bordeaux landscape. In addition to the void that allows for drying hoses, it contains seven training levels connected by stairs, as well as a covered porch at its base for the firefighters’ physical training.

As in Royan, the Benauge Barracks also experiments with a theme dear to Claude Ferret and the architects of the Modernist Movement: polychromy. The barracks develops a subtle balance between white, the predominant color of the concrete and painted masonry, and two other colors: the “Corsair Red” found on the metal facades facing the Garonne and Rue de la Benauge, as well as small touches inside the round concrete moldings and beneath all the landings of the Drying Tower. Yellow is used on the woodwork and telescoping roller shutters, and on the facades facing the street and the service yard.

Unfortunately, over time, the original work of the architects was significantly altered, including the replacement of the entire Garonne-facing facade and the removal of the hovering vertical circulation shafts on the yard-facing facade. In 2014, after years of efforts to prevent its demolition, the Benauge Barracks was listed as a historical monument. Soon after, despite the firefighters’ strong attachment to the building, the SDIS (Departmental Fire and Rescue Service) decided to vacate the site, marking the beginning of our work to give this iconic building a new life.

We envision the creation of a hybrid space, largely open to the city, where culture, gastronomy, hospitality, and daily life will mix.

The former garages will be transformed into a cultural space open to the public, hosting various artistic practices. The reconstruction of the monumental “Corsair Red” porthole doors will allow for a wide opening to the city, both towards the quay and the former service yard, which will be transformed into a garden.

At the heart of the new landscaped park, the iconic Drying Tower, with its former gymnasium at its base, will offer a large, versatile cultural space open to the public. The administrative wing of the fire station will be preserved and converted into a seminar center. The rehabilitation of the former conference room will restore the original glass paving tiles, light fixtures, and the curved corrugated metal wall that highlights the interior vault.

The housing building facing the Garonne, which previously housed 40 apartments for the firefighters, will be rehabilitated to host 95 hotel rooms, all with views of the river. The open-plan design of the barracks allows the new interior layout to follow the original facade alignment, which will be fully reconstructed. The people of Bordeaux will rediscover the red aluminum portholes and yellow telescoping shutters.

On the top floor, beneath a slightly raised canopy, we will integrate a restaurant with a terrace, offering panoramic views of the Port de la Lune and the “City of Stone.”

The 20 former apartments on Rue de la Benauge will be rehabilitated and converted into private housing. The entire facades and interiors will be restored in respect of the original design. A linear shared garden will provide access to each of the five apartment blocks from the heart of the site.

At the southwestern edge of the site, we will place a new building that will include 77 apartments. Its L-shaped layout at the edge of the site provides the necessary breathing room for a good integration with the Barracks. It keeps the memory of the original parcel layout and the inner courtyard of the former service yard. The building features a repetitive grid of white concrete, 5.60 meters wide and 8 meters high, placed on a base punctuated by asymmetrical arches. This protruding grid, highlighted by long planter boxes, connects the levels in pairs, blurring the perception of the number of floors and giving the building an elongated appearance.

The facades of grey patterned concrete are positioned slightly set back from the protruding grid, depending on whether they include the apartments’ outdoor spaces. This creates a secondary plane with a round pattern that links to the moldings and portholes of the Drying Tower. Between each grid, this secondary plane integrates large windows systematically. At the level of the living rooms, the balconies of the intermediate floors align with the windows to preserve the double height of the grids.

These windows, as well as the undersides of the balconies and their guardrails, are colored. Two shades of blue and the yellow of the Barracks subtly evoke the polychromy experimented by Claude Ferret and the architects of the Modernist Movement. The architectural design of the new building echoes that of the Barracks while establishing its own contemporary style.

Finally, the re-naturalization of the former service yard will create a large garden that will provide a new cool haven for the entire Bastide neighborhood. From the Quai Deschamps, a pathway crossing this garden will link Rue de la Benauge while passing under the archway of the former fire truck entrance. This journey will frame the Drying Tower and allow the public to discover and appreciate the inner workings of the Benauge Barracks, which remain largely unknown.