Location: Sarlat-la-Canéda, France

Design Team: Dominique Coulon & Associés

Area: 2173 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Eugeni Pons

Design Features: On the site of a century-old foie-gras factory left unused for more than three decades, Dominique Coulon & Associés brings together a 1,442 m² new media library and a 593 m² renovated music school within a 2,173 m² public cultural complex in Sarlat-la-Canéda. The project is less a simple contrast between old and new than an attempt to establish a contemporary civic scale between the medieval town's golden masonry and its ochre cliff.

A surviving factory wall is retained along Rue Jean-Baptiste Delpeyrat, while the former administrative residence is converted into the music school. A 410 m² inner court links the two buildings, and a 1,640 m² open esplanade extends south toward the trees and rock face. Visitors pass through the old house's porch and cross the courtyard to reach the library, turning the preserved fabric into an active sequence between street, school and public events.

The library plan bends in response to the cliff, and its fragmented elevations echo the fine grain of the historic centre. Sarlat's ochre colour enters both the concrete envelope and the reading rooms. Cantilevered load-bearing walls and long structural spans release an open interior, while high windows, skylights and double-height volumes frame shifting fragments of tree canopy, old town and sky.

The project's defining room is a reading cave carved directly into the cliff. Exposed rock enters the library and contributes to humidity and thermal comfort, while the building's contact with the mineral mass provides useful summer inertia. The main reading floor, inner court, staff patio and upper public terrace create several routes for pause, allowing reading to move between seclusion and civic exchange.

The material strategy extends this acceptance of the site. Rubble from demolition repairs the retained facade, while stones gathered on site were pressed into insulation panels to create an artisanal mould whose irregular imprint was transferred to the new concrete. Aggregates came from nearby quarries, and a mineralising treatment reduces long-term maintenance. Rather than separating history from intervention, the complex recomposes rock, old walls, courtyards and public life as an inhabitable urban terrain.

Design Team: Dominique Coulon & Associés is led by French architect Dominique Coulon. Born in the Jura region in 1961, Coulon studied architecture in Strasbourg and at Paris-Belleville before establishing his Strasbourg practice after graduating in 1989; the studio adopted its current name in 2008. Its work focuses largely on public programmes, including libraries, theatres, music schools, educational buildings, sports facilities and healthcare.

Rather than applying a predetermined formal method, the practice develops spatial order from the complexity of site, use and historical context, often working through colour, light, extended sightlines and dynamically interlocking volumes. Coulon has taught at the Strasbourg School of Architecture since 2007, where he founded the master's programme Architecture and Complexity, and received the French Academy of Architecture's Grand Gold Medal in 2022. He led this project with Guillaume Wittmann, Olivier Poulat, Mathilde Blum and Alexandre Puech; site supervision was undertaken by Steve Letho Duclos and Mathilde Blum.