Fabien Tran Nguyen, the lead architect of Mind Architecture, works through his projects on the envelope of buildings and especially its use on interfaces to mix different things such as public and private spaces, urbanscape and seascape, port and cities, and different materials according to their relevance on climate change.
The project involves the restructuring and extension of the harbor master’s office at Pointe Rouge port in Marseille, France.
Built in concrete in the 1980s, the facility no longer meets current needs in terms of space, functionality, visibility, and energy efficiency. The goal is to improve the working conditions for the port staff and the reception conditions for boaters.
Harbor master’s offices have particular requirements, juxtaposing the need for views on the water from the interior with the absence of exterior sunshades due to the seaside location.
The main idea of the architectural design was to insulate the existing concrete building from the outside to retain the material’s thermal inertia inside, create an extension with the same materials to uniformize the facades, and add a lighter wooden elevation. All openings in the existing building are preserved, and to improve thermal comfort, wooden sunshades were added within the exterior insulation. These sunshades are oriented differently depending on the facades and their exposure.
On the construction site, with the carpenter, the choice was made to use standard wooden construction elements, such as frame studs treated them with autoclave class 4 for seafront resistance, and assembled into prefabricated frames on-site. This principle is simple and cost-effective enough to be repeated on numerous projects and can sustainably deal with the increasingly intense summer heat due to climate change.
The architects and the project owner aimed to contribute to the emergence of the local wood industry, using Aleppo pine, still underdeveloped in the region.
In a disparate urban-port landscape dominated by blue hues, the project stands out with its vocabulary of traditional masonry construction and wooden elements in brown tones. The harbor master’s office is noticeable within the landscape and seamlessly integrates with its immediate surroundings and the distant backdrop of the Marseille metropolis.
