On a hilltop square in Biot, in the south of France, Atelier EGR sinks the Biot Municipal Building Extension below ground and hands its roof back to the village as a paved belvedere over the valley.
The chapel of Saint-Roch marks the edge of Biot's historic centre, a stone gable with a rounded apse and a low tiled roof. Beyond it the ground gives out. The village stops at a ledge, and below that ledge the land falls away through pines and scattered villas toward the Bâchettes car park and the valley.
Atelier EGR read the ledge as the project. A thousand square metres of municipal programme go underneath it, and what arrives at street level is pavement. “The extension develops below the level of the public square,” the studio writes. “The roof constitutes a new floor in the continuity of the public square.”
That new floor is exposed aggregate, poured flush and scored with thin metal inlays running between small discs set into the surface. Nothing on it competes for height, so the chapel keeps the skyline and reads, in perspective, as the link back to what the village inherited. The far edge opens on wooded slopes, pale villas and ridgelines stacked toward the horizon.
At that edge a flat canopy rests on a row of slender board-marked concrete columns, deep enough to lay a rhythm of shadows across the paving by late afternoon. Inside it a glazed lift rises, “visible as a campanile, a unique emergence on the square with the chapel,” carrying people between the level of the historic centre and the car park below. The one vertical element permitted on the square is the machine that moves bodies through the section.
Below the paving the building shows itself only where the road drops. Pale concrete holds the grain of its shuttering, openings are cut with stepped reveals, and looped steel balustrades curve along the ramps in one repeated figure. The meeting room sits at the bottom, terrazzo underfoot, its rear wall glazed onto a patio where the limestone is left as the excavation found it, “revealing the rock at the foot of the chapel.” Civic building rarely gives away this much: the town gets a floor, a view and a lift, and the only new elevation it has to live with is the one it already had.
