The new town hall of Scharrachbergheim, a small alsatian village, seeks horizontality and transparency to integrate into this magnificent wooded site. The external regular framework of the wooden structure affirms the public dimension of the building, while ensuring a timeless aesthetic, out of fashion. The dark and velvety tint of the protective pine tar and the refined and elegant sizing of the wooden columns echo both the village’s colombages and the site’s trees. The corten steel expanded mesh cladding gives an almost woven appearance to the facade and the hue recalls the tones of local stone (Vosges sandstone) very present in the historic village. The ensemble is contemporary but rooted, rigorous but gentle. As if it had always been there.
At the center of the building, a built emergence offers a generous interior volume to the reception hall, the heart of this new Town Hall. But it acts above all as a village-wide signal for this new centrality that the future Town Hall must constitute. A copper weathervane incorporating the 2 blazons of the village is installed at the top and completes this connection to traditional architecture while reconnecting with the almost childish pleasure and wonder of signs and symbols.
This emergence is also crucial for natural over-ventilation of the building, actively contributing to summer comfort. The insulation is bio-based and provide a strong thermal phase shift, coupled with the inertia of the concrete slab, for a comfortable building in all seasons, requiring very little heating (Passivhaus level) and zero active cooling. The interior partitions are made of raw-earth bricks (adobe), left exposed or covered with a white earth finishing. These bricks, made by the artisanal brickyard Lanter (20km from the construction site) are masonry with a loess and straw mortar, like the torchis technique of the Alsatian constructive tradition.
The entire structure is made of wood (framework, wooden frame walls, windows frames and interior finishings). The main beams span the entire width of the building allowing freedom of development and subsequent uses without intermediate structure. A kind of wooden Crown Hall ! The local wood framework is left exposed throughout the building. In the the council and weddings hall, the structure is elegantly deformed to create a wooden vault giving fullness and solemnity to this symbolic space. The curved beam are made of solid wood cut, thus resuming an ancestral savoir-faire, without needing any gluing, bending or other complex techniques. The digitization allows a variety of profiles creating a variable inertia vault in both directions.
The council and weddings hall opens generously towards the outside through two large sliding frames. This interior/exterior continuity allows a varied use, and a direct connection with this new space of meeting and conviviality, for the use of all.
