Project 02 — Museum & public archive
Open Hall
- Status
- Concept design
- Program
- Museum & public archive
- Location
- Lyon, France
- Area
- 18,500 m²
- Target year
- 2030
Open Hall — concept design, axonometric study
The idea
A museum with no front door. The galleries float as one long room above a covered public square that the city keeps for itself, day and night.
Museums guard their thresholds. Open Hall removes the threshold entirely: the entire ground plane is an open, sheltered square — free, unprogrammed, lit through the gap between the plinth and the floating hall above.
The collection sits in a single continuous room, sixty metres long, carried on a handful of slender columns and one concrete core. Visitors rise once and walk the archive end to end, in daylight filtered from the north.
At night the hall glows over the square like a lantern. The museum closes; the architecture stays open.