Structure studio Tolila+Gilliland used a palette of tactile supplies to “have interaction the senses” on the Gilbert Raby Therapeutic Workshops in France.
Situated on the Gilbert Raby hospital campus in Meulan-en-Yvelines, the constructing was created to offer day care and inventive workshop areas for sufferers recovering from habit.
Basing the constructing’s design on the central notion of care and wellness, Paris-based Tolila+Gilliland targeted on creating vibrant and open areas with uncooked supplies akin to uncovered brick and plaster.
Dug right into a sloping web site, the constructing sits on a bolstered concrete base, and was constructed utilizing compressed earth bricks and earthen plaster with a timber-frame roof.
All through the interiors these supplies had been left uncovered, and externally the constructing was lined in picket shingles, creating an “invitation to the touch”, that runs counter to the normal expectations of hospital structure.
So as to give its customers a sense of company, these areas are additionally modular to permit for variations to be revamped time.
“We have an interest within the notion that structure can help care via environments which encourage interdependence,” founder Nicholas Gilliland advised Dezeen.
“The invitation to the touch is central to an appropriation of the house: uncooked earth brick and uncooked earth plasters are each stable and smooth to the contact, their imperfections a function reasonably than a weak spot.”
The workshops had been organised round a central five-metre-wide “bioclimatic avenue”, illuminated by massive skylights within the roof above.
On both facet of this central avenue, the bottom ground accommodates particular person remedy rooms, a kitchen and pharmacy, whereas the primary ground homes the workshop areas and a laundry.
A double-height house to the south incorporates a small stepped seating space for gatherings, shaded from the solar by massive steel louvres on the outside.
“Somewhat than defining a set operate to the road, it’s conceived as an appropriable house for each sufferers and caregivers,” Gilliland advised Dezeen.
“[It can] function an impromptu amphitheater, serving for group bulletins, shows and performances tied to the actions throughout the ateliers.”
“The upper-level corridors wrap this house on both facet to create a horseshoe configuration with views under,” he added.
The Gilbert Raby Therapeutic Workshops has just lately been longlisted within the well being and wellbeing venture class of Dezeen Awards 2023.
Tolila and Gilliland was based in 2011 by Gilliland and Gaston Tolila, based mostly in a former warehouse in Paris that the studio renovated for itself..
