Mokuzai is a real gateway to the Belvédère district and the city of Bordeaux. Designed by IT’S, Mokuzai is an office building that includes public health services, and features a mixed timber and concrete structure. Its location results in a building that needs several main façades. The north-east façade, on Impasse Tregey, receives incoming flows to the district and thus to the city; the north façade opens onto Boulevard Joliot-Curie and houses the main access to the building; finally, the south façade welcomes pedestrians arriving from the Eiffel Park. All sides therefore have equal importance in relation to the city and Mokuzai adapts to the different aspects.
The roof, visible from neighbouring buildings, becomes a fifth façade, hence the decision to break up the terraces and grow plants on them. Mokuzai seeks quality and continuity in the landscape at different scales and levels, from public space to roofing. The building is innovative: environmentally, thanks to its mixed wood and concrete structure; innovative in its articulated relationship with the city and the landscape; the porous ground floor open to the boulevard allows visual and functional continuity between inside and outside. Mokuzai is an architecture that reveals the ability to make the city.
Detailing is an element in humanising architecture. The building reinterprets the materials of the stone city and enhances them with a delicate work on the vertical decoration. The façade pillars vary in shape and size: wider on the ground floor (a ‘giant’ layout) and progressively thinner on the upper floors. Remarkable work was dedicated in particular to the facade composed of prefabricated concrete, where the level of detail, decoration, and formal variation of the pilasters, cornices, and parapets would not have been possible without the development of prefabrication, which significantly shortened the construction time of its volumetric articulation.
Mokuzai – Japanese for wood – evokes a building culture where the presence of nature is an essential condition for the well-being of its occupants, in line with the biophilic design principles that guided the project. The ecological approach is not limited to technological and bioclimatic choices, but expresses the emotional relationship between people and space. Every design choice adopts the well-being of its occupants as a measure, and in this sense, the program implemented in the building’s design – the headquarters of the MSA – further enhances its meaning. Mokuzai is a manifesto expressing the relationship between nature, care, and human well-being, and thanks to its volumetric articulation and heights, it offers all work areas unique views of Bordeaux.
