Located in the heart of France’s Cantal region, the small city of Aurillac is the stuff of postcards, its surrounding landscape featuring the smoothed peaks of the extinct Massif Central volcanoes. Although this sleepy town is a six-hour, southward drive from Paris, it entertains a cosmopolitan point of view. It hosts an annual street theater festival that champions the Theater of the Absurd tradition, as well as a 155-year-old museum devoted to local art and natural history. A new multipurpose hall, designed by London-based Brisac Gonzalez Architects, riffs on Aurillac’s geological heritage as well as its highbrow predilections.
The site of the hall, which serves as a venue for concerts, trade fairs, sporting events, and theater, was neither topographically nor culturally memorable prior to this building. When Brisac Gonzalez entered the Aurillac municipality’s competition for the project in 2003, the site was used as a parking lot and occasional fairground adjacent to the city train station. “Though technically called the Plaza of the 8th of May, commemorating the end of World War II in Europe… it was in essence a vast residual space,” says Edgar Gonzalez, who founded his architecture firm with Cécile Brisac in 1999 after winning an international competition for the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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