The Volcano

The object resembling a volcano or cooling tower was designed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in collaboration with his Parisian colleague Jean-Maur Lyonnet, with whom he designed the headquarters of the French Communist Party a decade earlier. The white volcano is located in the center of the port city of Le Havre in northern France, which was heavily damaged during the Battle of Normandy and rebuilt after World War II according to a design by Auguste Perret (in 2005, the city center covering 130 hectares was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site).
The complex located at the western end of the Bassin de Commerce waterway originally served as a cultural and artistic center. The large “volcano” housed a theater auditorium with a capacity of 1,200 spectators and a cinema with 350 seats, while the small “volcano” had smaller halls for 500 and 80 spectators.
Only two white-painted reinforced concrete hyperboloids rise above the surrounding level. The remaining spaces are located underground. Similarly, the entrance square is sunk below the level of the surrounding streets via ramps. Niemeyer thus created his own artificial landscape full of curves and rounded shapes in the midst of the orthogonal city planned by Perret.
In 2006, Niemeyer approved the conversion of the smaller “volcano” into a municipal library, which now bears his name. The second part of the cultural complex continues to serve for theatrical performances. The authors of the renovation, which took place from 2012 to 2015, were Dominique Deshoulières and Hubert Jeanneau from the Parisian studio DJ Architectes.