The two bars where the Pesmois were regulars, where they mingled, in the summer, with tourists on a spree, have closed this year. One of them could reopen in September but, for the time being, we have to make do with the makeshift refreshment stands that the few shops that bring life to this medieval village built on the hillside, overlooking a river that meanders gently to the Saône, have set up in front of their windows. Pesmes may be classified among the most beautiful villages in France, but it is not immune to the wave of depopulation that is affecting old town centres all over the country.
This is where the architect Bernard Quirot, born in 1959 in Dole (Jura), grew up. This is where he lives and works today. After a long escape that took him from Paris, where he spent twenty-five years, to Besançon, via the Villa Medici in Rome, he opened his agency there in 2008, and has worked with it ever since to revitalize the village. In addition to projects such as the health center in Vézelay (Yonne), which earned him the Equerre d’Argent prize in 2015, or this winery whose construction site he is currently supervising in Pauillac, in Gironde, for the Château Lafite Rothschild, he has renovated, with his agency BQ+A, many houses in Pesmes, as well as the school, for which he also designed an annex building.
If the revitalization of old town centers is a fight, then Bernard Quirot is a valiant artillery colonel. Aware in this case that architecture is the sinews of war, he created an association, the aptly named “Avenir radieux”, to spread its culture in the village. It offers free advice to anyone wishing to renovate their house, and organizes, every summer, an architecture seminar that sees a series of cultural and festive events flourish while about twenty students reflect on the future of the village. Hosted by locals, they have two weeks to design a project based on one of the situations that the organizers of the seminar identify year after year for the potential for transformation they contain.
Self-build site
This year, for example, there was a ruined house, wedged between two others that are still standing. How to let the light in? How to give it an outdoor space? How to create inspiring views? There was also a barn, relatively uninhabitable at the moment but which has the potential to become so. And this abandoned farmhouse that sits on the large square opposite the school and the town hall, wouldn’t it be possible to turn it into a municipal bar? And while we’re at it, to connect the building to the rampart garden towards which it points, and to the grandiose perspective that it reveals on the landscape? By piercing the facades, we could increase the depth of field, bring the entire square into the small dark street that runs behind it and, conversely, make visible, from the square, the magnificently sculpted stone mantle that makes up its material.
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