Le Silo

When Marseille decided it was high time for a new opera house, they took stock of their existing infrastructure and made the choice to renovate a building instead of erecting a brand new one. Overlooking the port of Marseille used to sit an abandoned grain silo. Situated in a neighbourhood slated for renovation, the emblematic and highly visible Arenc Silo, built in 1926-7, faced demolition.

But rather than destroy the building and start from scratch with new materials, the City decided to transform it. For many years, the silo sat vacant and abandoned, but when the neighbourhood began undergoing renovations, the idea to convert it into something more useful sprung up – since 2004, the structure has been listed as a “Heritage of the 20th Century” site.

The resulting Arenc Silo is an adaptive reuse of a large historical grain silo into an opera house was designed by C + T Architectes. The space opened in September of 2011 and began its new life as a member of the arts community, leaving behind traces of its past industrial existence. Its reinforced concrete structure was upgraded, shored up and converted to house offices, a rooftop restaurant, new parking and a large performing arts hall with over 2000 seats. The Silo as it is now locally called, retains much of its original character in its industrial structure: the large theatre space was carved out of the former hollow area in the center.

As for the seating, our solution for this job was also pretty special: we had to supply a chair matching the interior design of straight lines and aluminum deco while proposing different solutions for fixed and mobile areas. Thus, the design selected was the Pompidou chair with flat outer back and two upholstered cushions inside; of course using aluminum all over the chair (seat & back outer panels, standards, etc.)
Needless to say the compact & mobile solution developed for this job was the real challenge: a side standard made out of injected aluminum mounted on mobile platforms. Apart from having the mentioned “removable option”, these standards have the synchro system inside: both seat and back are connected into the structure so they open and close together providing the smallest envelope. So, all the chairs distributed in the front rows of the Stalls area are equipped with this system that allows sets of chairs to be taken away when needed: either for a rock concert or due to the special technical requirements of certain shows that need the stage to be extended.