Long famed for its perfume, the ancient town of Grasse sits high up in the hills above Cannes, overlooking the French Riviera. While the terraced perfumers’ gardens now belong to the likes of Dior and Chanel, the dense historic center has deteriorated, its decaying fabric home to a poor, immigrant population. In one particularly rundown neighborhood, designated a priority zone by the national government, the municipality chose to build a new library and cultural center to replace an old, inadequate facility nearby. The result of targeted demolitions in the 1940s, the site was complex: steeply sloping, it measured barely 10,000 square feet for an ambitious 40,000-square-foot program; it included historic housing that had to be incorporated into the project; and it faced a large 1950s covered reservoir whose structure was too fragile to support any extra load. It was into this challenging context that Paris- and Nancy-based Beaudouin Architectes and Marseille-based Ivry Serres, winners of the 2011 architectural competition, deftly inserted their clever, elegant design.