The first thing that struck Julien Chavepayre when he arrived on the site of the Therapeutic Educational and Pedagogical Institute (ITEP) in Rivehaute (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), was its invisibility in public space (paradoxical if we consider considers that, with its 5 hectares of land, it occupies half the area of the village), 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, you must in fact locate the small sign at the entrance to the town and take an alleyway which takes a tangent from the departmental. In the parking lot that looks like a wasteland where we end up, an empty space bordered by two farmhouses with blind facades gives a glimpse of a vast lawn, an alley that goes at an angle and a series of buildings of which nothing indicates their function.
“We don’t know where we aresummary this pillar of the Encore Collective, an architecture, town planning and landscape agency located in rural Béarn, on the edge of the Basque Country. There is no real entrance, not the beginning of a welcome… For the children who are brought here, children who are violently exposed to exclusion, to stigmatization, to invisibility, that we travel by car from institution to institution, which are, for many of them, particularly distressed by the void, this large shapeless space, without identity, can only be distressing. »
Self-taught one-man band, Julien Chavepayre acts as architect, programmer, urban planner in all the projects of this agency including his wife, Anna Chavepayre, Swedish architect, a graduate, registered with the order, and winner in 2018 of the Kasper Salin prize , the highest distinction in the discipline in Sweden, is at the origin.
Read the interview (2019): Article reserved for our subscribers Anna Chavepayre, architect: “Our approach consists of accepting all spaces as they are”
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In the summer of 2023, he will be contacted by Les Events, the association which manages the operation of ITEP. Decided to embark on a thermal renovation project to cope with electricity bills whose amounts have exploded, 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 lease of life appeared as an avenue to explore, as part of a reflection to emerge from a severe operating crisis, the origin of which dates back to 2013. law on inclusive schools, promulgated that year, which allows children with disabilities to be educated in schools in the Republic, disrupted the functioning of the institution, which never really recovered.
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