“La baie des rois”, Libreville, Dec. 2021
Forest, Wood, Wind, and Water are the elements that strike the cord of sustainability, culture, and space-making. The building is poised to brace those elements to define its architectural typology. Its components are deemed to be replaced and renewed as they age. Its external envelope comprises 470 triangular frames of weathered and engineered Padouk, en emblematic local wood. The double curtain allows cross-ventilation into specific internal spaces while others can be sealed off for airtightness needs.
The new COMILOG headquarters in Libreville, in the “Baie des Rois,” is a unique opportunity to seal the historical and national destiny of the mining company in a singular furrow in Gabon’s identity Crib. Spatially and symbolically linked to the city of Moanda in the province of Haut-Ogooué, the destiny of Comilog is national and seats in the front row of the mineral wealth of Gabon.
The architectural act presented here must be read in light of the entanglements of symbolic, cultural, and industrial outcomes. It aims to offer society a robust, optimistic, and mobilizing vision towards the significant future challenges of technological, industrial development, sustainable development, and green revolution.
The project bears four objectives:
A/ Starting from the specific conditions imposed by geography and history to create a recognizable place in the national project of the Libreville
corniche, today, the “Baie des Rois.”
B/ Justifying a formal approach based on the potent symbolism of the forest and local culture through its envelope in Padouk wood and its “sinuous and free” articulation according to Gabon’s principles of traditional architecture.
C/ Proposing an inscription on the site that exploits its topographical and landscape qualities to produce an efficient and modern working and living environment that, while reinforcing the image and prestige of the company, while offering its inhabitants spatial and unique sights of the coastline, and Libreville estuary.
D/ Proposing an architecture with high environmental quality through the management of rainwater, the control, and reduction of energy consumption. Energy production through renewable sources to achieve a net-zero qualification.
On the maritime and historic facade of Libreville, which saw the birth of the Gabon nation – today the Bay of Kings – Comilog, after sixty years of anchoring in the lands of Haut Ogooué, now has the opportunity to reveal its role as an emblem and standard-bearer of Gabon’s industrial ambition.
Through this architecture, the intersection of the weight of history with forest and cultural ecology on the one hand, and the natural and symbolic power of Gabon’s mineral wealth, on the other hand, captures the challenges of the contemporary world for release energy and an optimistic outlook towards the future. The building bends entirely to the site’s constraints to reveal a radical typology that combines local symbolism and the projection of modernity while deploying many sustainable development strategies in its implementation and operation.
Getting anchored in a symbolic and historical melting pot. The shores of the Libreville estuary, since the construction of the church of Sainte-Marie, have been the point of dialogue with otherness and self-construction of the territorial identity of the city and the developing country. The cathedral dominated and identified the Fort d’Aumale with the boats landing goods, new inhabitants, or new masters of the lands to be conquered.
Since then, there has been the master plan of Marcello D’Olivo, who, by marrying the relief and the morphology of the coastline, has designed one of the most beautiful cornices of the Atlantic facade of our continent. The main developments sketched out on the great Friuli architect drawing board are still waiting to be implemented. Almost five decades ago. There was a string of grand hotels and amazing beaches at one time.
The establishment of Comilog follows that of Total (Elf at the time), which involved the big names in French architecture of the 70s and 80s, in particular Claude Parent (the theoretician of oblique architecture), Michel Andrault, and Pierre Parat (the Totem Tower, the Palais Omnisports de Bercy, in Paris) in a competition won by the duo Lesné-Bernadac in 1976, with an eminently marine evocation, borrowing from travel and maritime navigation and which continues to define the profile of the bay of Libreville.
So there was the Elf building; now there will also be the Comilog building. To do this, we wanted to offer an encounter with the otherness and the marine horizon of a local body, emerging from its forest, dressed in its culture, bending to the winds, and offering itself to the new challenges of the contemporary world while in pride and optimism.
A dynamic and sustainable architecture The Comilog building will be entirely covered with a mesh of padouk wood frames, stained and shiny, which will provide it with exceptional protection from the sun, on its two very long and main facades, to the east (to the rising sun) and the west (at sunset). The “double skin” principle creates a sun and air filter, an essential barrier to heat and humidity. The fully glazed interior facade preserves diffused natural light in all the office floors and spaces of the building while releasing unfathomable visual perspectives towards the bay. Energy inputs in terms of mechanical air conditioning or lighting requirements are thus reduced. The padauk scales of the outer skin intermittently house photovoltaic panels, which, with other sustainable development strategies implemented (use of wood, reduction of energy consumption inputs, vertical axis wind turbine, recovery of rainwater, passive air conditioning) will significantly contribute to a possible HQE certification, if Comilog is willing to support this approach.
