The Strong Silent Type: For a contemporary art center, an architect plays with light and transparency to create a new home for the collection as well as an experience for discovering it.
While Rennes, the capital of France's Brittany region, does not make most travel guides' must-see lists, the university town of 200,000 still has its charms: crooked medieval streets lined with half-timbered buildings, stately 18th-century edifices, and cafés that spill out onto picturesque squares. But all this fades away by the time you reach Beauregard on the city's northern fringes. Here, open fields have yielded to a scattering of bland apartment buildings that began appearing in a wave of development in the 1990s. Built into a slight rise at the end of a long, grassy park, FRAC Bretagne's new center for contemporary art, designed by Paris-based Studio Odile Decq, punctuates this prosaic setting with a staunch—though subdued—assertion of French modernism.
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