Living in the Tanneries of Barjois

The thesis has dealed with the theme of a compatible re-use of an industrial highly polluted site in an Occitan town. The architectural tool that has been used are the so-cal- led 'soft techniques', aimed to get a best quality of life for the inhabitants, reducing the consumptions of resources.

The choice of the site and the why of this project are tightly connected. The aim of the project is to give a form and a function that would integrate the building with the natural and urban landscape that surrounds it, evoking in the meantime its spatial and structural complexity, outcomes of stratifications and enlargements that have been made within the centuries. Soft techniques make reference to the concepts of reversibility, cheapness and meaning, that’s why the used materials are poor and simple, as the values that have marked these spaces from 1608, year of the first tannery installation due to Jean-Baptiste Vaillant, up to the closing of the same one in 1983, last factory of an industrial district that has brought the small city of Barjols to deserve the title of 'European leather’s capital'. The desire to re-approach the community of the village to the Tanneries Vaillant, lead me to develop a multi-functional program, that provide a ground floor opened to public and endowed with spaces that evoked the industrial past of the buildings, and a superior ground in which provide a program of social housing (expressly requested by the Plan Local d’Urbanisme of Barjols) by the insertion of wooden frame forms, insulated at a thermal and at an acoustical level, independents from the existing structure, so as to manage the huge volumes and the internal heights of the buildings.