ARSONIC

Programme: Renovation of the Ancienne Caserne des Pompiers (Former Fire Station) for the fitting-out of a place dedicated to sound art and contemporary music.

About: Firstly, because it contains successive traces of the palimpsest of urban Mons, the main body of the existing barracks have been conserved and its obsolete annexes removed. This allows the emergence of a multi-sided puzzle setting off the porte de Nimy: - A northern fragment along the inner ring + - A main body that is strategically preserved + - An entirely terraced intra-block fringe. The second concern was to find an architectural language that conveys the performance of a mostly acoustic project or how to first and foremost generate a first minimum amplitude of 4000m³ that fits in with the context. With this handmade urban addition, Arsonic includes a room for unamplified music of 280 places surrounding an atypical central stage, a rehearsal room for a quartet, and a place for sound mediation called the chapel of silence. For these areas, no ostentatious decor, but a geometry and materiality purely at the service of sound. The outer shell adopts the same attitude. On the façade overlooking the public space, Arsonic sets out, via its perforated skin, to react literally as an absorber of urban noise. Without preliminary aesthetics, before a multi-layer system including an absorbent layer, the apparent siding has been pierced with a pattern of sequential rhythms similar in this case to those of a MIDI file.