NEW BOOK on the Herculean task of moving mountains and building in stone.Carl Fredrik Svenstedt Architects defy gravity, building monumental architecture in structural stone. Through images and text, the fascinating journey from idea to reality, with projects in France and internationally.With texts by Jean-Philippe Hugron, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Carl Fredrik Svenstedt, &nbsp;photos by Dan Glasser, Herv&eacute; Abbadie, Sergio Grazia, and images by CFSA, Luxigon and MIR. Published by Arvinius and Orfeus Publishing, graphic design by Sara Jassim, editor Marica Finnsio.&nbsp;

Moving Mountains

A veiled timber structure, the building is an urban presence on a station square in Versailles&#39; Chantier neighbourhood, between a park and an urban farm. The shell houses a local food store, with sports activities in a winter garden on the top floor.&nbsp;For Magidas Ruimy, with ANM quantity surveyors, T/E/S/S structural and facade engineers, Elements environmental engineers. Photos by Herv&eacute; Abbadie.

VERSAILLES BIOSPHERE 

The Pinnacle rises from amongst the trees along Wuhan&#39;s historic East Lake, recalling the mountains on the horizon, clad in their green cloaks.&nbsp;The spire twists to offer views of the water from all the hotel rooms and rooftop gardens, and widens at its base for a congress centre with a vertical atrium and reception halls on several levels.

PINNACLE

Below the hills of Tain l&rsquo;Hermitage, cultivated since Roman times, the winery forms an undulating garden wall in structural stone, built for quality and emotion. The thermally inert, porous stone creates ideal conditions for wine. Ramps allow visitors to discover the wine making process and lead to views of the hills from the roof.

DELAS WINERY

At the edge of the Royal Park, the new Quartier de Gally, master-planned by Lambert Lenack, is inspired by the Garden City, a green neighbourhood for living and working.&nbsp;The apartments for ICADE are two simple blocks of stone, carved to give &nbsp;ample outdoor spaces for residents. The apartments sit in a private garden, framed by a ring of row-houses designed by Jean-Christophe Quinton Architects. &nbsp;

VERSAILLES HOUSING

What would a European data centre look like?&nbsp;Could we build a data centre in stone?How sustainable could a data centre be?<a href="//www.evroc.com">www.evroc.com</a>

evroc

The wine shop is a thickening of the garden wall opposite the winery. It is a linear space behind shading, staggered stone pillars. Its entrance is a circular “bite” taken out of the building to save a hundred-year-old Chestnut tree, a symbiotic relationship, as the tree shades the glazed entrance. 

DELAS WINE SHOP

The winery for the Domaines OTT marks a new horizon, a mineral presence anchored in the rolling landscape above the historic Chateau de Selle. The new building is built of solid stone, in blocks staggered and rotated to create openings and views. The stones are placed at incremental distances, making a porous yet massive screen.

DOMAINES OTT

The spatial representation of democracy is renewed with each inflexion of history.&nbsp;The extension of the Louvre on the site of the destroyed Tuileries Palace wing is a proposal in two phases, starting with a temporary installation accessible to the public, facilitating a public debate about the site. A potential permanent extension would prolong the museum with new exhibition spaces, while also extending the public gardens vertically with an open walkway up to the roof.

LOUVRE EXTENSON

Champagne springs from the rolling hills in which the winery is inextricably rooted. Material and topographic symbiosis manifest above, where a green roof continues the contours of the landscape, and below, where the delving structure reveals chalk hidden beneath the earth. Efficient and adaptable architecture and intelligent technological solutions ensure optimal conditions for wine production, storing, and aging.

CHAMPAGNE

What is a Ch&acirc;teau?&nbsp;In the shadow of the ruins of Ch&acirc;teauneuf-du-Pape, the new winery emerges as a mass of stone among the trees and vines, a presence on the horizon. The building is foremost a perfectly calibrated tool for making wine: precise, adaptable and built to last.

Château de Nalys

Built using the ruins of an existing farmhouse destroyed by earthquakes, the house aligns along a hill to face the Sibbiline mountains. The building is staggered like an extended telescope, with alternating courtyards and openings that give dynamic views, shifting inside out and diagonally to the horizon.

CASA WARD

In the heart of a small wine-making village, the Domaine Jean Louis Chave is a discrete volume hiding its treasures. Simple monolithic stone spaces house the ancient craft of cultivating grapes and making wine in the most natural of atmospheric environments.

DOMAINE JEAN LOUIS CHAVE

The Halle Meuli&egrave;re is a gourmet food hall next to the Versailles Palace. It is the centerpiece of the new Gally residential neighbourhood at the end of the Palace gardens, filling a reconfigured former military warehouse. The food hall is on the ground floor levels, while a public community hall and theatre fill new spaces under the building.

HALLE MEULIERE

The existing mansion affirms itself as the central element of the garden, and is renovated as a guest house, linked to the winery. It has a restaurant and tasting rooms, bedrooms overlooking the garden and a cellar for the historic bottle collection.

DELAS GUEST HOUSE

The sun warms the surface of the stone, soft as sand. Visitors can measure themselves against the human scale of the blocks, close enough to be touched. It is a meeting of the senses. What remains are the pines, the vines and the mountain.

OTT INTERIORS

The house is built on the site of a former vineyard with a view over the Luberon valley, a protected regional park with strict guidelines imposing traditional building materials. The ruins of the old stone farmhouses were preserved so as to frame the new house, while the guesthouse and a swimming pool where inserted within the old walls.

STONE HOUSE

Building in stone implies carving a mountain, the result imposing and profound, creating a presence with self-evident materiality. On this site, near the Cistercian Abbaye du Thoronet, building with stone extracted from Roman quarries places the project in a temporality resonant with the landscape.

OTT AGRICULTURAL

An oval colonnade of stone pillars marks a new pavilion and square for visitors arriving by train. Inspired by the follies of the gardens nearby, the rounded alignment guides visitors freely on towards the chateau, or inside to an enveloping space for information.

VERSAILLES

Sometimes it may be true, that less is more.&nbsp;This project delicately adjust an existing bastide, or manor house, completing the three sides that make for an elevated courtyard. By adding a fourth exterior wall, extending the arches hidden underground, the winery gains a front facade while adding precious space for wine tanks - visible behind the tinted glass.

DOMAINES OTT CHATEAU ROMASSAN

A discrete intervention, with pavilions in the garden the only visible new element in this complete renovation of La Rochelle&#39;s Mus&eacute;e des Beaux Arts.With Agence Goutal, Heritage Architects, and a highly qualified team of museum experts.&nbsp;

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS DE LA ROCHELLE

This authentic, if modest, Modernist villa suffered an unfortunate extension after the war. The new renovation creates a bolder form complimenting but more clearly contrasting with the historic building. New openings optimize sunlight and create a better link to the garden.

VILLA LURCAT

The 96 individual student rooms were built offsite, delivered by truck, and stacked in under five days, reducing the construction time to two months, excluding site work.&nbsp;The units are arranged to create two blocks with shared social spaces for the students, interior atria, a central access courtyard and several outdoor areas.

MODULAR HOUSING

Building in stone is about moving mountains. It is the near Herculean task of making a building, the hope that the buildings have life, but also that they move us to a certain emotion. It is furthermore quite literally about moving mountains, the act of transferring a profound material to build in solid, structural stone.