Saint-Louis Museum: ORIGINES

The project reimagines an existing building as a museum through a strategy of rehabilitation rather than erasure.

The intervention works with the architectural character of the existing structure while introducing contemporary elements that remain deliberately legible.

The museum program includes reception and visitor spaces, exhibition rooms, a gift shop, support spaces, an internal courtyard and a sculpture garden.

Kintsukuroi.

The project draws from the principle of Kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken objects by emphasizing their fractures rather than hiding them.

Applied architecturally, this principle allows new interventions to remain visible and contemporary while entering into dialogue with the existing building.

The rehabilitation therefore does not attempt to erase the building's transformations. Instead, old and new are allowed to coexist as readable layers.

The existing building presents a cut corner that interrupts the continuity of the surrounding urban frontage.

The rehabilitation uses this condition as an opportunity to recompose the facade through a lightweight addition that restores a stronger urban continuity while clearly marking the museum entrance.

The intervention draws from the building's characteristic arched openings, allowing the new facade to remain connected to the architectural language of the existing structure.

The arched window is an important architectural marker within Saint-Louis and within the existing building.

This motif informs both the rehabilitation and the museum's visual identity, creating continuity between architecture, intervention and branding.