Médiathèque de Sarlat-la-Canéda

About this place

Set at the edge of Sarlat-la-Canéda's remarkably intact medieval centre — a UNESCO World Heritage site of honey-coloured limestone — this 2025 project by Dominique Coulon & associés navigates one of the more demanding contexts in French contemporary architecture: how to build new without capitulating to imitation or provoking ruin. The brief paired a new media library with the renovation of an adjacent former administrative building that now houses the conservatoire. Rather than imposing a singular civic monument, Coulon fragmented the programme into volumes that echo the scale and rhythm of the surrounding townscape. The façades are formed from cast concrete, its texture imprinted from moulds made using salvaged rubble and stone — so the material of the historic city is literally inscribed into the new fabric. One wall of a century-old foie gras factory is retained along Rue Jean-Baptiste Delpeyrat, anchoring the intervention in local memory. The key spatial invention is the "reading cave" — a room pushed into the ochre cliff itself, thermally buffered by the rock. Around it the library spreads across double-height volumes that capture northern light through carefully positioned clerestories, avoiding the bleaching glare of direct southern sun. A courtyard mediates between library and music school, bringing daylight deep into both wings while giving onto the raw cliff face — a reminder that this is, quite literally, built into the landscape. The material palette — ochre, warm concrete, timber — achieves continuity with Sarlat's stone without pastiche. The building knows what it is: contemporary, public, civic. It adds to the historic fabric without apologising for its own moment. For visitors: enter from Rue Jean-Baptiste Delpeyrat and seek the cave room — its thermal calm and geological presence are unlike most spaces in a French médiathèque. The courtyard is the emotional centre of the project.