Gruyère 公路服务站改造丨瑞士弗里堡丨BARAKI

Architect：BARAKI

Location：Fribourg, Switzerland; | ;View Map

Project Year：2022

Category：Car Parks;Highways

Built in the late 1980s, the Gruyère roadhouse was designed in the spirit of post-modernism and reconfigures vernacular materials and architectural elements to form a set of several buildings including the sanitary building, the subject of the current transformation. This existing construction is composed of a masonry base, mainly reinforced concrete, with a facing made of local river pebbles visible from the outside. A glued laminated timber frame forms a 2-sided roof. This triangular volume is laterally offset and creates a covered area in front of the entrance to the sanitary blocks. In order to take the loads, four oblique beams are extended to the ground, framing impressive openings onto Lake Gruyère and the Fribourg Prealps.

The client's wish was to clean up the dated sanitary facilities, as well as to eliminate internal circulation, favoring direct access from the covered area in independent toilet cubicles. The priority was ease of maintenance, improved comfort and safety. The client gave freedom of expression and architectural integration without specification.

Architecture is not necessarily reserved for large complexes, buildings of public importance and representation. The Baraki office is interested in the experience of daily life, the break on a motorway service station, the profane infrastructure kiosks. Ultimately, these spaces and constructions are frequented by everyone. We pass through them, we stay there, without realizing the time and space we occupy. This subject is at the heart of several infrastructural achievements within the office. Can a public toilet become an observatory of the landscape?

The large mirror plane in polished stainless steel, which hides in its reflective surface the joints of the doors to the toilet cubicles, gives the impression of an extension of the landscape opposite to infinity. It avoids the question of adding a new range of materials in the context already loaded with references and architectural forms. The stainless steel is camouflaged, the plan becomes abstract and invisible. The asphalt floor follows the paths and roads in the surroundings, the linear LEDs on the ceiling are integrated into the existing cladding straightened and sanded. What remains is the view and an aerial feeling. The mirror gives the illusion of a structure with 8 supports that restore symmetry to the off-center structure. This effect plays a game with the asymmetry of the existing building.

Passing through the doors, we enter a space made of complete stainless steel, like a space capsule, clean, modern, automatic, served by a service corridor at the back reserved for maintenance staff. The complexity of such a simple gesture remains hidden. At the front, a series of urban furniture designed in collaboration with Elie Fazel and Valentin Sieber invites us to stay, to rest. Seating elements, tables and coat racks, all made of stainless steel sheets and tubes, are grafted onto prefabricated concrete road modules “City Blocks”. A new space for contemplation and architectural quality emerges from a previously unnoticed place.

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