Toulouse School of Economics

About

Originally a Celtic city, Toulouse, the capital of the southern Occitane Region of France, is known today as La Ville Rose – The Pink City – because of the terracotta brick of the city’s buildings. The School of Economics is positioned on a key site, at the break of the historic city wall. It is a strategic project from a historic point of view – because the building completes the breach in the wall –, and also from an urban one, at the turning of the 17th-century Canal du Midi, close to the River Garonne. At such a symbolic location, the composition reinterprets the most characteristic elements of the city: the buttresses, the walls, the ramps, the cool mysterious interiors, the cloisters, and the courtyards. The building draws in the social space of Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines Church, and is fragmented into two ‘bars’ that are 10.8 m deep, thus providing natural air, light, and ventilation to each office. This arrangement generates rich public and permeable spaces that connect with the existing fabric. The building is completed with austere finishes in concrete and brick. The latter came from a nearby factory where bricks were still made in practically identical ways as the Romans had made them, so the crust of this building sits into the breach of the wall, continuing it... [+] [+]

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva