Architectural Narrative

The project aims to transform an area of Lausanne into a new arts district, centred around the city’s three main museums: Fine Arts, Photography and the Museum of Design and Contemporary Applied Arts. All this activity is sited within a very complex urban setting, affected by old railway yards currently in a state of disuse.
As for the urban strategy, the decision to unveil this part of the city and connect it with the Station Square entails sacrificing the 19th-century building that exists on the site to generate a new public space. The idea is for the three new buildings to gravitate around this open space and to be understood as a single entity. The design features a collection of found fragments, incorporating them from the start. The building’s new foyer emerges from the end facade of a former train shed like an objet trouvé. This ultimately becomes the design’s main compositional element from which the museum’s entire programme comes to life. Hence, elements such as this facade, some stretches of train tracks or the arches of the northern wall act as spring mechanisms to trigger the memory of the place and allow it a clear presence within the ensemble.
As in a large industrial factory where structure takes priority over the composition of facades, the building can be defined as an inhabited wall that separates, with precision, the industrial world from the new public space.

Visual Narrative

This visual series explores the project’s layered identity through light, composition, and material atmosphere. The images reveal a campus defined not by tension and memory. Found fragments—arches, façades, and embedded rail lines—are reintroduced as central figures in the design, evoking the site’s former life while grounding the ensemble in the present.
Wide compositions articulate the building’s scale and its relationship to the new plaza, while more intimate views document the structural clarity and tactile immediacy of the inhabited wall.
Together, the series presents a reading of architecture as both infrastructure and artifact—a resilient framework that holds space for memory, movement, and transformation.