The Jean Moulin School, built in Bernay (Normandy) in 2012 by Prinvault Architectes (Paris) replaces a school destroyed in an arson attack in 2009.
The project satisfies three requests of the municipality: to adjust the size of the school to the current local schooling needs, to redefine the nature of the relation to the existing family center and to rejuvenate the area with a contemporary building.
Built on a single level, the building is organized around a central corridor with niches recessed to accommodate benches and create various informal spaces for children. Different sized windows frame multiple views of the court, the sky or the treetops.
The building skeleton is a timber frame structure, its roof is green and the heating burns wood.
The new building has hence overcome the traumatic loss with its range of 1000 colorful cladding strips that match the colors fire: a digitized photo revealed a spectrum of 2.5% black, 2.5% zinc yellow, 2.5% yellow gold, 2.5% red-brown, 25% orange-red, burgundy 25%, and 40% carmine red... A random formula Excel is then used to generate the distribution of the 1000 strips the facade cladding component.