The context

The commission concerns Hall 2 of the Montpellier architecture school. The students dislike the space's suffocating atmosphere as well as its lack of light, especially at night, when the contrast between the dark hallway and the passageways is particularly jarring. 

The commission

Students rally to change their school

Carmen Perrin proposed to work from the existing lay-out : after clearing the structure of the successive additions that had been added over time and crowded the space, the floor and walls would be replaced with panels of semi-transparent polycarbonate. The project will bring a sense of luminosity and rid the hall of its "heaviness", whitout modifying the original architecture. 

Carmen Perrin

Carmen Perrin was born in 1953 in La Paz, Bolivia, and lives in Geneva since 1960. Halfway between architecture and visual art, her structures give life to the relationships, exchanges, forces and rituals that make up a public space. In conjunction with her work, she develops collaborations with artists working in a variety of other disciplines (choregraphy, architecture and landscape architecture), which questions her way of working and the impact of her work in the context of a social reality.