MONTPELLIER CITY HALL

Designed by architects Jean Nouvel and François Fontès, Montpellier’s new City Hall embodies the vision of a contemporary, sustainable, and high-performance public building, located in the Port Marianne neighborhood. To clad the 3,500 m² of ceilings in its three main halls, Jean Nouvel called on ^{ALYOS® to} install stretch ceilings, following the advice of acoustician Jean-Paul Lamoureux (Avel Acoustique). The artist Alain Fleischer—a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker—designed the monumental images reproduced on these ceilings. Three distinct works, three worlds, for three spaces with very different functions.

In the Welcome Hall, some seven hundred photographs and extensive scenographic design have come together to create a tribute to the city’s archives: excerpts from civil registry records spanning various eras, from medieval parchments to registers written in ink with a quill pen. Births, marriages, deaths, property deeds, official decisions, visits by prominent figures… hundreds of documents seem to be falling from the ceiling, transforming this hall into a place of living memory.

In the Council Chamber, key moments of the French Revolution are displayed against a blue backdrop: the Storming of the Bastille, the Constituent Assembly, and the premiere of “La Marseillaise,” evoked through film stills from early historical silent films.
In the Salle des Rencontres, a massive, colorful fireworks display fills the ceiling. Projected onto the sky above Montpellier, this ethereal space of celebration and light features two young trapeze artists meeting in mid-air above a composition of landscapes from the city’s surrounding area.

Printed in very high definition and in wide formats (up to 5 meters without seams), these three ceiling panels—each measuring approximately 700 m²—achieve the highest acoustic performance with an absorption coefficient of αw = 1.0.

Images: © Alain Fleischer / © Luc Boegly