“We may be tiny, but we’ve made other places in the region jealous,” proudly declares 80-year-old Hubert Zoutu, mayor of Heudebouville in southern Normandy, a village of 800 souls in the Seine Valley. The reason for their envy? Heudebouville’s splendid new school—a $4.7 million, 17,000-square-foot facility that replaces a cramped, inadequate jumble of buildings dating back to the 19th century. “What’s more, it was a team of young architects who built it,” continues the mayor, referring to Charles Hesters and Pierre Martin-Saint-Étienne, both 34, cofounders of the Paris-based office HEMAA, who won the December 2018 design competition with a little help from Charles’s architect parents, Jacques Hesters and Brigitte Oyon (of Hesters-Oyon, also in Paris). “My parents had too much work, so we offered to do the competition design,” recalls Charles. “They have a lot of experience with schools, and corrected a couple of things here and there, but the project was ours. We hadn’t yet founded HEMAA, so it was submitted in their name, but we oversaw construction after setting up our office.”
Located on a (literal) greenfield site, in the shadow of Heudebouville’s 13th-century church tower, the École Les Coteaux Fleuris takes its cues from the context. Under the village’s planning regulations—recently updated with environmental concerns in mind—earthworks must be kept to a minimum, which ruled out major excavation or embankment of a site that slopes gently in the direction of the Seine. Consequently, in a layout reminiscent of medieval strip farming, HEMAA organized their building as a series of parallel wings, each slightly lower than the previous one as they descend the hill, linked together internally by a long hallway (the only place inside where the slope is perceptible). In a growing village—population is expected to reach 1,000, due to the presence of a nearby industrial zone—this arrangement also has the advantage of allowing future enlargement. While the school is dimensioned for 150 pupils (it currently counts 93), its wings could easily be lengthened, in the case of greater population growth, without disturbing the functioning of the existing parts. “We already put in some of the drainage for that,” explains Hesters, “and registered the school with the fire authorities as bigger than its current capacity, so as to ensure a smooth transition when the time comes.”
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