French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have created a red tile-clad pavilion at the Piacé Le Radieux arts centre in France to display artist Pascal Rivet’s wooden replica of a Lincoln car.
The Bouroullec brothers were invited to design the Lincoln Pavilion by French artist Rivet and Piacé Le Radieux director Nicolas Hérisson in the village of Piacé.
Located in a roadside field, the shelter contains a full-size wooden sculpture of a 1960s Lincoln Continental that is now a permanent public installation.
Visitors and passersby can observe the artwork through large windows incorporated into one side of the structure, emulating a vitrine used to display artefacts or models in a museum.
Lincoln Pavilion features a steel frame and corrugated iron roof, which are painted the same shade of red as the terracotta tiles used to clad the internal and external walls.
Italian tile producer Mutina supplied its Rombini tiles for the walls and the textured Pico tiles for the floor. Both of these tile collections were designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.
The Lincoln Pavilion project is the result of a series of coincidental encounters, including a crossover when Ronan Bouroullec was studying in the Breton city of Quimper where Rivet worked at the European Academy of Art.
“A few years ago, I gave a lecture in Quimper in which I mentioned how much Pascal Rivet’s work had marked me,” Bourloullec recalled.
“By pure chance, Pascal was in the audience. We became friends, and three years ago he asked me to come up with a solution for this full-size sculpture of a Lincoln.”
The iconic American car is recreated at a 1:1 scale and painted in the original colours. Rivet has previously produced similar replicas of other familiar vehicles including pizza delivery mopeds, a Brink’s security van, a combine harvester and a tractor.
This sculpture was originally built in Rivet’s studio in Brest and was exhibited in 2011 at the Le Lieu Unique centre for contemporary culture in Nantes. At the time, it was unpainted and displayed in a replica barn filled with hay bales.
Lincoln Pavilion faces the adjacent road and during the day its large windows reflect the surrounding landscape. The interior is illuminated at night and takes on a cinematic quality, with the sculpture appearing to be framed in a widescreen aperture.
Visitors can use a small ladder at the front of the building to obtain a higher vantage point of the artwork.
The structure was built by local craftsmen from the rural Sarthe region in central-western France where the Piacé Le Radieux arts centre is based.
Piacé Le Radieux is dedicated to architecture, design and contemporary art, providing a place for reflection and research on the region and its heritage.
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec began working together in the 1990s, completing their first industrial design projects for Italian design brand Cappellini and presenting a solo exhibition at Galerie Kreo in Paris in 2001.
The brothers have since applied their innovative, playful and human-centred design approach to projects for brands such as Vitra, Artek, Alessi, Flos, Mutina and Samsung.
Other recent projects by the Bouroullecs include a simple and durable high-back chair for Japanese furniture brand Koyori and a chair for Italian manufacturer Mattiazzi featuring a beechwood frame wrapped in rope.
Working on a more architectural scale, the brothers created an illuminated folly installed in a river in Rennes, France. They also added a marble water feature and circular steel bench to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.
The photography is by Claire Lavabre.
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