la source vive rises above Lake Geneva
On the wooded heights above Lake Geneva in Évian, FranceLa Source Vive appears among the trees with a rounded bronze skin, half-hidden by the slope and the older wooden silhouette of La Grange au Lac nearby. The new music room brings another presence to Les Mélèzes, the musical ensemble formed by the two venues.
Initiated by Aline Foriel-Destezet, the project brings together Patrick Bouchain and Philippe Chiambaretta, with PCA-STREAM leading the architectural development. Its location next to La Grange au Lac is central to the story.
The oldest hall, built by Bouchain in 1993 for the Rencontres Musicales d’Évian, is known for its wooden structure, suspended acoustic dome and pine forest setting. La Source Vive extends this pedigree with a different temperament, more mineral, more grounded and built for year-round chamber music, rehearsals, performances and recordings.
images © Salem Mostefaoui
a copper shell placed on the slope
The design divides the program into three parts to reduce its presence on the website. The hall sits higher, in a clearing chosen to preserve healthy trees, while the foyer has been rebuilt on the existing footprint and expanded to accommodate audiences for both spaces.
The dressing rooms are located uphill, along the existing access road to the Hôtel Ermitage, making the movement of musicians and instruments more direct.
Inside the 490-seat hall, the architecture follows the acoustic brief with unusual discipline. A concrete base supports the tiers and stage, while an acoustic concrete shell is clad in raw cast plaster. Around it, a technical void separates this inner room from a second shell of wood and copper.
The outer envelope reads almost like the footprint of the volume inside, with pre-patinated copper tiles arranged in a scale-like pattern that will shift as the material ages among the surrounding trees.
La Source Vive is located among the trees above Lake Geneva, France next to La Grange au Lac
architecture tuned like an organ
Acoustician Albert Xu collaborated with Bouchain and Chiambaretta during the design phase, guiding the room’s volume, rake, surfaces and materials. The final form combines an oval plan with a conical section, giving the room a volume of about eleven cubic meters per listener.
PCA-STREAM developed a digital twin of the project so that the acoustic behavior could be controlled through successive stages of construction, from the concrete vault to the placement of plaster, seats, floors and the suspended sound dome.
The interior gives this technical process a tactile surface. Raw plaster creates the luminous enclosure, with deeper reliefs at ear level to diffuse sound and finer patterns rising towards the eye. Pink beech forms the floor and stage backdrop, while leather seats and metallic details add warmth without relying on the stuffy absorption of a traditional concert hall.
Above, an aluminum sound dome is made of crescent-shaped sheets, each drawn and angled to guide reverberation through the room.
the copper hall is semi-integrated into the hillside to reduce its footprint on the wooded site
daylight enters the concert hall
The eye at the top of La Source Vive brings natural light into a typology that is usually shaped around darkness. It can be turned off for performance conditions, but during rehearsals it lets the room keep in touch with the sky, the time and the changing weather outside.
As daylight cuts through the plaster and reflects off the beech, the room takes on a faint pink hue that stage lighting would struggle to replicate.
The approach to the room also creates a small transition between the forest and the music. Visitors move from the glass in the foyer to the half-buried hall, passing through a rock-cut corridor and a walkway before entering the luminous interior volume.
Around the building, landscape studio Coloco collaborated with the existing forest, adding more than 150 trees and 200 shrubs, enlarging a lake and using local Meillerie stone to build the rocks. The greatest interest of the work lies here, in how a concert hall can be designed through listening, climate, craftsmanship and the slow behavior of materials.
a glazed foyer connects the new chamber room to the existing timber concert hall
the outer copper envelope follows the acoustic volume formed inside the hall
