A Simple Solution for a Complex Site

To return architectural sense to the Le Mans Hospital site, Michel Rémon "re-fabricated" its entrance. A simple but essential idea to facilitate the routes of visitors and patients and to guide pedestrians along a large tree-lined mall.

This entrance, which can be seen immediately from the access roundabout to the site, is part of a long, 135-meter façade that "holds the site" from east to west. As a foreground at the heart of a jumbled composition of pre-existing medical wings, this façade provides a basic urban line. Facing directly south, it is protected from the sun by a sober refined colonnade with a style that calms the view, making it intelligible and coherent. "The grand façade does not seek to hide the old site, but to build its lost urban nature." 
Thus, the vertical rotunda of the Claude Monet building on the north, visible through the glazed roof of the new hall, becomes the focal point of the composition. It acts as a "dolly-in" that leads visitors to the heart of the hospital site.

To the east, the perspective is closed by the nineteenth-century hospital chapel, while it opens abruptly to the north to include the Aliénor maternity ward.

From the Fontenoy building on the west to the new Sergent hospitalization building to the east, the entire functional coherence of the site has been re-established by a system of connections and links that are based on the existing layout.

"Our program is an initial step before the gradual contraction of the site. The arrangement of outpatient services at the front goes in the direction of the revolution that is modifying the ergonomics of the hospitals of today."