The first thing that caught the attention of Julien Chavepayre when he arrived at the Therapeutic Educational and Pedagogical Institute (ITEP) of Rivehaute (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) was its invisibility in public space (paradoxical if one takes into account that, with its 5 hectares of land, it occupies half the area of the town), as well as the lack of legibility of the space it occupies. To access this establishment dedicated to the education of children and adolescents with behavioral disorders, it is necessary to locate the small sign at the entrance of the town and take an alley that takes a tangent from the departmental road. In the parking lot that looks like an open field where we end up, an empty space bordered by two farmhouses with blind facades reveals a wide lawn, an alley that runs at an angle and a series of buildings whose function is not indicated. .
“We don’t know where we are.summary this pillar of the Encore Collective, an architecture, urban planning and landscape agency located in the rural area of Béarn, on the edge of the Basque Country.. There is no real entrance, nor the beginning of a welcome… For the children who are brought here, children who are violently exposed to exclusion, to stigmatization, to invisibility, who travel by car from institution to institution, who They are, For many of them, especially distressed by emptiness, this great shapeless space, without identity, can only be distressing. »
Julien Chavepayre, a self-taught sole proprietor, acts as architect, programmer and urban planner in all of this agency’s projects, including his wife, Anna Chavepayre, a Swedish architect, licensed, registered in the order and winner of the 2018 Kasper. At its origin is the Salin award, the highest distinction in the discipline in Sweden.
In the summer of 2023, Les Events, the association that manages the operation of ITEP, will contact him. Determined to undertake a thermal renovation project to address skyrocketing electricity bills, the board of directors saw this as an opportunity to establish a functional diagnosis of the building. The idea that architecture could help the establishment find a new life appeared as a way to explore, within the framework of a reflection to get out of a serious operational crisis, whose origin dates back to 2013. Inclusive schools law, enacted year , which allows children with disabilities to be educated in the schools of the Republic, disrupted the functioning of the institution, which never really recovered.
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