Benoît Martres, head of the AMM agency in Toulouse, specializes, with his team, in the design of electrical source substations for Enedis and RTE. But it also knows how to diversify, like the restructuring of the Sciences Po Toulouse buildings, a significant project.
Between Mur-de-Barrez, where his parents lived when he was born at the Aurillac maternity ward, in 1978, in Saint-Affrique, where he completed his secondary studies, Benoît Martres crossed Aveyron, from north to south. Following the transfers of his father, an executive at EDF, who took the family to Corrèze then to Castres before, therefore, a return to South Aveyron, where the young man took his scientific baccalaureate, in 1996.
A significant meeting
Freshly graduated, he left for Toulouse where he joined the architecture school. “Already in final year, I wanted to be an architect,” he confirms. At the end of his training, in 2002, he joined the firm of Pierre Malacan where he had already completed an internship in 2000, while he was a student. We must believe that the feeling had passed between the two men since the architect offered the young graduate to hire him on a fixed-term contract. Employed for eighteen months, the Aveyron resident took a further step in 2004.
“It would be good for you to settle down,” Pierre Malacan then told him. This allowed Benoît Martres to become a collaborator for two years before reaching a new milestone, in 2006, when he became a 50% partner in the agency, located in the heart of Toulouse, which was then renamed Architecture Malacan Martres (AMM).
A logical transition and a very smooth handover which materialized, in 2018, with the 100% takeover of the agency by the Aveyronnais, when Pierre Malacan retired, forty years after creating his company.
“It was a great meeting,” recalls Benoît Martres. “We got along very quickly and worked well together. He was born in 1950, we are thirty-eight years apart. And when we joined forces , he immediately told me that he wanted to pass on the agency.”
An agency which has specialized, from the start, in the design of source substations for Enedis and RTE, “industrial and technical buildings” linked to the transport or distribution of electricity. “This is 60% of our activity. Our approach combines rigorous methodology and pragmatism following solid experience with the constraints linked to the technical specificities and complexities of this type of work”, confirms the Aveyronnais who, with his team of ten employees, has RTE as its client “in Occitanie and Aquitaine, but also in the Paris region, in the Alps and even a construction site, currently, in Calvados. We therefore have the honor of participating on our scale to the public service mission of electricity.
A major project in Toulouse
AMM is also positioning itself on public markets, such as the restructuring of the Sciences Po Toulouse buildings which has just moved into the former tobacco factory. But “working in the industrial environment suits me very well,” assures Benoît Martres. “With always the concern to best integrate a building into the urban or rural environment.” As he knew how to do in Aveyron, notably in Fondamente, Bertholène, Naucelle and even Saint-Victor-et-Melvieu.
This Aveyron where he grew up and to which he is very attached. “It was in Saint-Affrique that my parents met while my father was attending EDF school.”
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