Frugal design / ATELIER JS.L creates TALK - A Collective Structure For TALM-TOURS

Frugal design / ATELIER JS.L creates TALK - A Collective Structure For TALM-TOURS - French designer Jean-Sebastien Lagrange inaugurates TALK, designed to improve the collective life of TALM-Tours, the Art and Design University of Tours city.

TALM-Tours hosts TALK

The new structure designed by Atelier JS.L

 

Designing living spaces conducive to exchanges between students actively contribute to the success of their studies. Aware of this issue, Atelier JS.L created TALK an innovative structure that refers to legendary designer Jean Prouvé, who collaborated with architect Bernard Zehrfuss in the creation of the building that now houses TALM-Tours.

Both practical for education, comfortable for users, and ethical through its production mode, TALK gives students the opportunity to enrich their experiences, and discuss their work with fluidity, but also to share moments of relaxation to stimulate their creativity.

Nestled into TALM-Tours’ ground floor, TALK invests the room on either side of the volume to recreate a dialogue between its two units. Its clean-lined design seems straight out of a life-size assembly game where curves and platforms meet skilfully over two levels. The minimalist outline and the choice of materials (Valchromat® and thermo-lacquered steel) are part of a frugal design approach, able to withstand daily stresses without altering its comfort.

 

Voluntarily open, TALK offers a multitude of possibilities. With its bleachers, tables, or benches, the structures adapt to all configurations and adopt all postures: sitting, standing perched, leaning, or lying down... Infinite modularity that everyone can appropriate according to the situation ranging from coworking to break moments.

Atelier JS.L Jean-Sebastien Lagrange Jean-Sebastien Lagrange is a French designer who graduated both from Ecole Boulle and ENSCI-Les Ateliers. He founded Atelier JS.L, his Parisian creative studio in 2010, where he confronts his background influences in a virtuous exercise halfway between craftsmanship, innovation, and reasoned industrial design.   Atelier JS.L collaborates closely with industries, institutions, and the world of culture, for which he designs living spaces, collective structures, installations, scenographies, and furniture collections, conceived in the prolongation of his interventions. He participates in great reflections on new collective space development and studies their impact on the environment. His design decodes with accuracy the social, economic, and environmental stakes to provide effective solutions, in order to share it with as many people as possible. JS.L challenges the current production modes and explores new ways of expression, adapted to our time.   As part of a frugal design approach, he responds with mastery to questions of use and economy of each project, both in design and manufacturing. Among his achievements; are scenographies for La Manufacture de Sèvres, the design of artists’ residences at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the design of liturgical furniture for the Chapelle de l’Assomption in Paris and the Climatic Table, developed in partnership with the Pavillon de l’Arsenal and the city of Paris. Since 2020, he leads with Agathe Chiron, the Teaching and Research Chair «Mutation des vies étudiantes», an initiative of the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (EnsAD), based on the student housing theme. TALM-Tours The Art and Design University of Tours city   TALM is a major player in education and culture, gathering three universities implanted in the cities of Tours, Angers, and Le Mans. All cultivate with modernity the long tradition of educating fine arts in France. Located in the heart of the Loire Valley, TALM-Tours offers a program of high-level artistic training   Since 2015, TALM-Tours is located on the MAME site, a former printing house, awarded Grand Prix for industrial architecture in 1954, built by architect Bernard Zehrfuss, designer Jean Prouvé and visual artist Edgar Pillet. Its conversion was carried out in 2015 by Franklin Azzi Architecture. Rehabilitated as a green district by Tours Métropole, the site now hosts la Cité de la création et de l’innovation and the French Tech Loire Valley, a new platform dedicated to digital start-ups with an international vocation.