The Departmental Museum of the Resistance was designed as part of the renovation project for the town center of Ivry-sur-Seine, with which Renée Gailhoustet had been involved since its inception. The choice of the site illustrates the political influence within this municipality run by the French Communist Party. Thus, the Museum was to take on the status of a prestigious cultural facility. It position was already laid out in the plans Gailhoustet drew up for the whole area in 1964, standing to the east of the town hall square, facing the Spinoza complex and the Raspail and Lénine towers. A library was to be housed in a separate building nearby. From an urban point of view, her concept provided the opportunity to complete the new district and thereby organize its different public spaces. Contemporaneous with the design for the two towers, it also reflects the architect’s thinking in the mid-1960s, as well as her frames of reference (Museum of Silkeborg, Denmark, by Jorn Utzon, 1963). The spaces of the Museum of the Resistance are designed to allow indirect light to penetrate into the interior and, like those for her duplex apartments, they are designed in sections. The size of the building is such that it is able to receive unusual and large-scale objects such as airplanes and airdropped containers. The volumes are partially buried, thereby reducing the building’s impact on the cityscape. This concept enables visitors to discover the collection from the entrance, positioned on a belvedere on the town hall side. A peripheral ramp completes the layout. The building’s powerful concrete portal structures, studied in collaboration with the engineer Kostanjevac of the Atelier d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture (AUA), are also cut diagonally, like a boat’s sails, to form north-facing sloping glass roof panels. This study for the roof would later provide the basis for the Marat project. Despite two separate ceremonies for the laying of the first stone in 1971 and the publication of the project in Lettres françaises, the raw concrete building was never built.
Bénédicte Chaljub
