Precise Acts - Hermès Workshops Normandy, France

The first passive, energy-positive, and low-carbon industrial building in France.

"The construction and implantation of the future building has to meet Hermès’ exemplarity and rigor of craftsmanship”. Precision — the quality of what is calculated, measured, provides unequivocal information. It is the keyword, and the main act that guided our design of the Hermès Workshops’ building in France. The hand’s precision and its gestures on leatherwork are transcribed in the drawing of the building, its implantation, its qualities, as well as its dimensions, sustainability, timelessness and evolutive capacities. These new leather workshops emerge from the exact site’s outline. They are drawn by the nearby nature and are placed on the most remarkable parcel of the site; at the perspective of the great region’s altimetry. Its orthogonal grid, orchestrated by its internal functioning, unfolding on the land, meeting the ground, encompassing the landscape, and dialoguing with the territory.

The structure of this building is marked by the power of the hand, allowing simultaneously the specific and the universal. In between alignment and organicity, the architecture is discrete, and blends itself with the landscape’s poetry. The great ‘spanning’ arches follow the workshops frame. As a manifest form of brick construction, the arch incarnates movement, and evokes the galops of a horse. These spans create large bay windows. The natural light is precise, comfortable, abundant, diffuse. The ceiling apertures, aligned to the north, invite a museal lighting into the space. The later illuminating with perfection the leather goods in the hands of their creators, accentuating life and vibration. The dialogue between the craftspersons and their creations is now possible. Fusion between the object and the artisan, between the artisan and the space, between space and landscape the new Hermès workshop is drawn at each step by its surroundings and operates towards high environmental ambitions. A passive building, low in Carbon footprint and positive in energies (Bpos E4C2) has nothing incidental and makes out of everything an environmental resource.