The Musée Maurepas sits on the ground floor of a social housing block built between 1960 and 1962. Its curved slab form has earned it the everyday name of la Banane — the Banana: 200 metres long, eight storeys high, 244 flats served by ten stair cores. At the foot of the slab there was a home for the elderly: twenty-five rooms occupying the ground floor and stretching into a small, attached volume, which later became space let out to local associations. The block stands at the centre of Gros-Chêne, an “industrialised sector” of 1,415 social dwellings built between the end of 1959 and 1962 for the municipal low-rent housing office of the City of Rennes,1 by the Paris firm Legrand & Rabinel in association with Jean-Gérard Carré, a Rennes architect then at the start of his career; the same team would go on to work on social housing in Rennes on many further occasions. Ten fifteen-storey towers of ninety flats each are set along two avenues running out from the ends of the “banana”; five lower slabs of four storeys complete the urban ensemble. Combining prefabrication with traditional techniques, the buildings came out of the ground astonishingly fast, alongside wider social infrastructure including a community centre, a club and hostel for young workers, a school group, two shopping precincts and a church. A 1964 publication of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, which became Archipel Habitat in 2004 (the public housing office of Rennes Métropole), singled out the architectural quality of the ensemble and its strong provision of collective facilities. The landscaping of the 1970s has made it, today, a conspicuously leafy neighbourhood.F

Gros-Chêne was the first part built of the “ZUP Maurepas” (a zone à urbaniser en priorité,2 1959–1966), which would eventually bring more than 4,000 social dwellings, for several landlords, to former farmland on the northern edge of Rennes. The flats were filled above all by inadequately housed young people from the city centre and by arrivals from the surrounding countryside and from immigration — this was the period of industrial expansion, the Citroën works opening at La Janais, south of the city, in 1961 — and by repatriates from Algeria as decolonisation ran its course. As in so many of France’s grands ensembles, the better-off later moved away, drawn out by home-ownership policies; the poorest remained, and their position worsened through the socio-economic crises that brought the Trente Glorieuses to a close. The modern comfort and the progress the estate had embodied when new slowly stopped radiating, and the stigmatisation of its poor population took their place. By the early 1990s the neighbourhood was being described as ageing, indeed as already old, and so Archipel Habitat undertook a measure of refurbishment. The outline of the old ZUP then hardened into the geography of national urban policy — ZUS, zone urbaine sensible, in 1996; QPV, quartier prioritaire de la ville, in 2015 — by reason of its concentrated poverty. Composed almost entirely of social housing in the lowest rent bands,3 it has the cheapest rents in Rennes. The neighbourhood is known as the poorest in Brittany, and in recent years for episodes connected with the drug trade — but equally for its dense associative life and for the artistic projects it has hosted, among them the residency of the poet Yvon Le Men in 2015.

With the creation of the Agence Nationale de Rénovation Urbaine in 2003, the question of the estate’s future was raised again. The City and Archipel Habitat commissioned feasibility studies and settled on the comprehensive, ambitious renewal of Gros-Chêne with very little demolition, under the Nouveau Plan National de Renouvellement Urbain. From 2017 the programme comprised the refurbishment of 1,200 social dwellings, the restructuring of the shopping precinct (the “Gros-Chêne slab”), a new school group and the renewal of the existing school, as well as the building of a new metro line to serve the neighbourhood.

One Percent

Metro Line B was built between 2014 and 2018 and opened to the public in 2022. Since 1951, certain public building projects in France have been subject to the “1% artistique”: one per cent of their budget of must go to artistic commissions (initially this applied to schools and universities only; later it was widened to include other programmes). Under the scheme for the construction of Line B of the Rennes metro, seven artworks were commissioned. Their siting picks out particular points on the route: the termini, the interchanges with Line A, the infrastructure itself (one artwork sits in a metro tunnel), and finally two stations chosen for the significance of their location — one near a cluster of secondary schools, the other at Gros-Chêne, “set in a priority neighbourhood of national urban policy, in full transformation”.

The work chosen for Gros-Chêne station is by Isabelle Cornaro: vitrine-sculpturesA placed in the public realm near the station, to show, in rotation, artists’ posters produced in partnership with the visual-arts scene in Rennes. Out of this came the idea of a “cultural concierge”: a small space for exhibitions and encounters to accompany the works outside. Archipel Habitat and the City considered possible sites near the metro station — it had to be somewhere people pass by. Several were examined; the choice fell at last on the building at the foot of la Banane, directly opposite the metro exit. As the programme was developed and the potential of the place revealed itself, the cultural concierge ultimately became a second site of the Musée des Beaux-Arts: City and Museum together made the most of the opportunity to promote art along with “equal access to culture”4 for every inhabitant of the city. Isabelle Arthuis, the artist commissioned for the first posters, was also retained to conceive the opening exhibition. So that the museum would be known before it opened, one of its outreach staff had been working in the neighbourhood since 2021, alongside the district office and several local associations.

The new galleries depends on the renewal of the whole neighbourhood. The City was careful to improve the housing at the same time as the museum was created, so that no one should feel a new museum space was being bought at the expense of the homes. That the museum slots into an existing built form points in the same direction: a modest presence, its riches to be discovered inside, already woven into the everyday lives of those who live there.

Freedom of Manoeuvre

The brief always looks like the beginning of a project, but it’s not. The starting point is the commission — somebody’s desire to make something happen, within a given time and a given budget. It is a consequence of the precepts of modernity that briefs have become professionalised. In competition briefs, experts in architectural programming fix, down to the very last detail, interminable tables of areas attached to specific rooms. The tables say nothing about habitability, nothing about space, use, or ways of living. This hyper-specialisation those involved with contemporary commissioning must suffer, freezes buildings in time and in space. Yet as Butler notes,5 through its history, architecture has been in the business of making habitable containers, not of providing “coachwork for processes”.

Looking closely at how the project of the Musée Maurepas and its neighbourhood facilities was carried out, two particularities stand out. First: when the architects answered the procédure adaptée under which the project was contracted, the commission was quite undetermined, retaining substantial freedom for manoeuvre. Second: the architects found a client who listened, who trusted them, and who built up brief and project in collaboration with them. Both factors helped ensure the success of the project.

Architecturally, the most astonishing aspect was the architects’ handling of type. To go into these notions is perhaps to go deep into the discipline; but the way these architects manoeuvre deserves a detour. To come quickly to the matter: the architectural type is an intellectual construction6 that conceptualises and characterises families of ways of constituting a work of architecture. It is architecture’s distilled substance — the way we architects systematise and clarify the modes of constituting a plan, a building, a space. To transform the type is to transform the consistency of the existing: to change the DNA of the already-there. The change of DNA can be done traumatically, transforming the physical condition of the building with a heavy hand. Or it can be done finely, delicately, producing a great transformation with very few means and very little physical change.

This is what TitanC — the young Nantes practice, entrusted here with the museum together with the toy library and the crèche — brings off in the project. The existing architecture, besides being rough, ugly and harsh, was hard to transform. Why? Because of the way it was built. Tunnel-form construction — a run of parallel load-bearing walls in reinforced concrete — rose quickly, and resists alteration. Leaning on the existing annexe, the architects shift what was a rigid, immovable space towards something flexible and transformable.

On one side, they connect each of the rooms — former dwellings — with doors, making a system of chamber and antechamber of the kind found in French Renaissance palaces: a simple device, widely used in the Haussmannian building stock, for instance, to guarantee a space’s resilience. On the other, the annexe building gives them their support as the general system of distribution. It becomes the spine of the plan.B The gallery connects the different programmes, each singled out by the colours of its finishes and furniture and by the shape of the rooflights over the three former patios. Today this spine is the point of contact between the three programmes that make up the centre. Tomorrow, if occasion demands, it will be the hinge by which the ensemble converts into a run of classrooms, or a student residence, or whatever use or programme one cares to imagine for the Maurepas of 2100. The building comes out of its transformation more resilient than it went in — and that is a great success.

The Beautiful in the Ugly

The existing building was harsh; it cannot be denied. Such post-war structures — repetitive, prefabricated, built at a scale that resists appropriation — are, for all their architectural qualities as housing types, almost universally negatively perceived: by the architectural profession, but also by residents and by society at large. And the slab they call la Banane, where the museum sits, is not the best served of them. It is long, unarticulated, and it blocks the central space of the neighbourhood. It was never the most loved of buildings. So appears to be a strong act by the client to put an arts centre, meant to radiate at the scale of the neighbourhood — and of metropolitan Rennes — in such a difficult place. Doing it meant finding good in the bitter, potential in the rough, beauty in the ugly, hope where there was none left to find. It meant looking at this existing condition with affection.G

Affection, the Larousse tells us, is a “feeling of friendship, of tenderness, of attachment towards someone” — here, towards something. In the second lecture of his cycle Sobre lo Otro (On the Other) — entitled, precisely, Afecto — Monteys7 denounces a contemporary architecture that handles the existing without affection. Two extremes stand opposed. On one side, an ultra-conservative vision of the existing: keep everything just as it is, prevent all reinterpretation — a position much aligned with the doctrines of architectural restoration. That extreme leads only to the museification of the object, and strips it of all meaning; the building becomes an object of tourist consumption. On the other, a standardised, ready-made vision of intervention on the existing: solutions applicable anywhere, taking no account whatsoever of the already-there

“Affection,” says Monteys, “implies having an opinion and also knowledge. It guarantees the coexistence of old and new.” Put otherwise: affection for a building might be the magic combination of the primary, unconscious perception felt in occupying it, with the certain knowledge that this primary perception is destined to fade — that this place, this space, must transform. Without the unconscious perception, we would clear everything away mechanically and begin again: a better layout, a new approach, more ecological materials, better fitted to present needs. Without such knowledge, we would stay prisoners of nostalgia — for a past that has closed, an experience gone for good. Primary perception, tied closely to a phenomenological8 vision of space, calls up memories of what we have lived in person, as human beings: a first visit to this building, or an experience from an earlier life. What counts is where it carries you, where it transports you — and that the affection you hold for that moment of your life lets you treat the existing building with respect: adapting it, bringing it to the uses and needs of today, while thinking of the uses and needs it may have tomorrow.

And that, in our view, is exactly what the Titan team achieved in this project: to understand the potentialities of the pre-existence and turn them into assets for the new neighbourhood facility. Far from the grand architectural gesture, their intervention shows a fine knowledge of the construction methods and the typology and morphology of what was there. Each architectural decision — the double height, the central spaces, the connection of room to room — is taken because the what already exists; because it indicates that decision as the most plausible solution, mediating, in a magical conjunction, what we have with what the new building will need.

In the former patios, the glass mosaic of the original facade has been uncovered and left visible; the walls of cavernous concrete, found under a coat of plaster as the works proceeded, are also left exposed, and their materiality marks the spaces. The new walls are concrete blockwork left raw, sharpening the mineral atmosphere of the exhibition rooms.

Between banality and specificity

The last key aspect of the project’s success is the dichotomy the architects play between the banality of the intervention’s end result and the specificity of the spaces made. Let us agree here on the concept of the banal. Banal is not to be understood as a synonym of ordinary. On the contrary: by banal we mean an architecture without jolts — one that makes no architectural junkspace,9 that is not there to assert its presence, or to impose itself on a context already very fragile. It is an architecture which, by its own consistency, has no need to position itself like a spoilt child demanding attention, but stands like a reflective adult, there to accompany the transformation of the neighbourhood without rushing it. That is how the new museum is perceived when one visits: a quiet presence, inserted into its context as if it had always been there — as if it were the evident consequence of the life of this part of the building.

Strolling through, one has the impression that Titan knew how to write one more chapter of this neighbourhood, without pretending to overturn everything — inscribing itself, as Távora would say, humbly in the life-process of a quarter.  But the banality displayed outside is not at the expense of a certain pleasure in modelling the interior spaces. The device of throwing an interior/exterior dichotomy into relief, with two distinct languages, recurs in other work by Titan — the École des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Nazaire,D for one. It shows at several points: where they take the technical void and make of it a double-height exhibition room; or where, in the crèche and the toy library, they reappropriate the old patio to make spaces specific to, and characteristic of, place and programme.

The museum opened on 1 February 2025. Entry is free, and the welcoming staff are also cultural mediators. It is open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday, 2 to 6 pm; Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings are kept for school visits. A gallery links it to two further facilities, a toy library and a crèche, due to open this summer. The museum hopes to work with these other actors and their publics — a way, perhaps, of bringing in people who would otherwise not enter.

Pushing open the door of this museum is made easier by its free admission. Its entrance is not intimidating, compared with that of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the city centre — a neoclassical building of 1855, of which some may well think: not for me. The architecture of the 1960s block offers qualities different from the historic site’s: an opening onto the outside, an inscription in a neighbourhood. At Maurepas, the new museum is almost banal — a simple volume against a housing block, a glass-brick facade giving a certain transparency into the interior. Some step in just to see; others come back, and bring someone with them, to show them a work that struck them.

The modest floor area, when compared with the main museum, necessitates other exhibition formats, between the patio — bright and tall — and the vitrines of the smaller, darker rooms. The vitrines answer the museographic constraints: security, and command of the environmental conditions. There is no permanent display; there are two temporary exhibitions a year, showing works from the museum’s collection. For the Musée des Beaux-Arts, this second site means chances to work on new themes, to find new ways of approaching art, and to experiment with participatory approaches.

The first exhibition, “Fantaisies”, open from February to September 2025, was conceived by the French photographer Isabelle Arthuis out of the museum’s collections. In workshops run in 2022 and 2023 with a group of residents, the participants chose objects from the collection and were photographed with them by the artist. The photographs were shown in the vitrines alongside a selection of objects, distributed across eight themes: cycle, heritage, accord, value, utopia, the shared table, euphoria and argument. In the patio, the artist hung paintings, also drawn from the collections; in sequence, they trace the course of a day.

The second exhibition ran from December 2025 to April 2026. Called “Ce qui nous lie” — What Binds Us — it was conceived by the visual artist Camille Bondon. She ran art workshops with a local secondary school and a popular-education association in the neighbourhood, and held a residency in the neighbourhood’s new school, from which came the curtain hung at the entrance to the exhibition patio. In this room, small clay sculptures called the bienveilleuses — the kindly watchers — are shown: a few made by the artist before the opening, the others by visitors in workshops. Two weeks before the close, a party celebrated their making: they were fired, and visitors were invited to carry one home. For the vitrines, the artist asked the workshop participants which objects brought them positive feelings; they then looked for their equivalents in the museum’s collection. The chosen objects were distributed across seven themes: a house & something to eat; parades & finery; to death & to life; languages & cultures; rituals & beliefs; play & festivity; out walking & travelling. A sound piece entitled “Réconfort, force et liberté” — Comfort, Strength and Freedom; recordings of personal testimony — completes the circuit.

Across these first two exhibitions we notice a strong anchoring in the everyday, and work around the great universal themes. The next exhibition will be shown at both the historic site and the new museum — three metro stops apart — with the aim of drawing visitors from the city centre out to Maurepas, and back the other way.

A Vector of Social Peace

The establishment of the Musée Maurepas in this Rennes neighbourhood reflects a desire to bring culture nearer to its inhabitants, and to make of the museum an actor in urban transformation rather than an institution isolated in the city centre. In a context marked by urban renewal and by heavy social stakes, the museum becomes a space of encounter, of dialogue and of participation, where art helps to strengthen the social bond and the feeling of belonging to a place. By taking up quarters in a working-class neighbourhood, it affirms that access to culture is a shared right, and that works of art can find their place at the heart of everyday life. Art, then, is not confined to aesthetic contemplation: it is an instrument for thinking about urban space, the relations between inhabitants, and the social realities of the present — helping the stakes of the neighbourhood to be better understood and opening new perspectives on its future.

On the other side, the project of the Musée Maurepas made a wager of affection: architects and commissioners believed in the potential of the existing building. The project rests on existing qualities, which it reveals and renders coherent through the fine command of a few spatial devices. It makes the synthesis between the constraints of the museum and those of the place: an ambitious project that nonetheless folds itself humbly into the neighbourhood through the reuse of an existing building. The opportunities of the place transformed the project and will keep this new museum alive.

This work of architecture, modest in scale and discreet, nonetheless allows a series of questions to be posed — questions that should engage architects, technical and political clients, and the public at large: Might this project be an example to follow, in the wager of joining culture and knowledge to the forgotten neighbourhoods of our cities? Can art be a vector of social peace? Would it not be more reasonable, in projects of transformation (and in the others too), to think of architecture as a whole — and not as one part of an administrative process, phased by criteria that assign each author a function rather than making them work together?

Is this small museum of Maurepas not a canonical example of how to act today, as architects, when we set about transforming the existing? And what of the sollertia of the architectural act, of which Vitruvius was speaking of already in antiquity? What is undeniable, to our eyes, is that this is a project that transforms a building — but above all a neighbourhood. Architecture is there to better the frame of life, to render service without imposing itself, with, as its backdrop, the valuing of the already-there, so that we can keep on using it.   

Epilogue by Camille Bondon

BetweenE September 2024 and April 2026, I initiated the exhibition "Ce qui nous lie" in collaboration with residents of the Maurepas neighbourhood. Together we explored the bonds that tie us to objects, in their relational, emotional, material and symbolic dimensions. We chose pieces from the museum’s collection and then developed contemporary collective works that were shown beside them.

From the artist’s point of view, as someone who comes in for the day, I feel I am simply trying to build on the work of the socio-cultural organisations and institutions already in place. To be one more instrument, slightly different yet complementary. To act, as they do, in the service of the common good. Art then serves as a pretext for encounter, for gauging what sets us apart and what binds us together, so as to form a temporary community around these intentions. The museum, in its institutional capacity, then serves as a space that validates and highlighting their contributions, so they might realise: my words, my drawings, my gestures, my choices make sense; they matter. That is something I can only sense in reality, like the smiles, the glances, the atmosphere during our times of making together. What is unfolding there, right now, in the present moment. There are also the echoes from the teachers, their emails sharing news, telling me what happens in between, when I am not there and the project goes on living and growing in their classrooms. And then there are the open arms of the little ones, who gather round me each time we meet again, because it takes time for a connection to form, and with it the confidence to venture into the unknown. It also takes time to adapt my project to other people’s rhythms, to tweak it and build on whatever emerges, because this isn’t about following a script but about writing it as we go along. Ultimately, the question should be put directly to the secondary school pupils, young adults and nursery school children with whom I’ve put this exhibition together, or to anyone else living in Maurepas: they are the ones most directly affected and best placed to experience and analyse this new development in their environment.