Architecture studio Tolila+Gilliland used a palette of tactile materials to "engage the senses" at the Gilbert Raby Therapeutic Workshops in France.

Located on the Gilbert Raby hospital campus in Meulan-en-Yvelines, the building was created to provide day care and creative workshop spaces for patients recovering from addiction.

Basing the building's design on the central notion of care and wellness, Paris-based Tolila+Gilliland focused on creating bright and open spaces with raw materials such as exposed raw-earth brick and plaster.

Dug into a sloping site, the building sits on a reinforced concrete base, and was constructed using compressed earth bricks and earthen plaster with a timber-frame roof.

Throughout the interiors these materials were left exposed, and externally the building was covered in wooden shingles, creating an "invitation to touch", that runs counter to the traditional expectations of hospital architecture.

In order to give its users a feeling of agency, these spaces are also modular to allow for adaptations to be made over time.

"We are interested in the notion that architecture can support care through environments which encourage interdependence," founder Nicholas Gilliland told Dezeen.

"The invitation to touch is central to an appropriation of the space: raw earth brick and raw earth plasters are both solid and soft to the touch, their imperfections a feature rather than a weakness."

The workshops were organised around a central five-metre-wide "bioclimatic street", illuminated by large skylights in the roof above.

On either side of this central street, the ground floor contains individual therapy rooms, a kitchen and pharmacy, while the first floor houses the workshop spaces and a laundry.

A double-height space to the south features a small stepped seating area for gatherings, shaded from the sun by large metal louvres on the exterior.

"Rather than defining a fixed function to the street, it is conceived as an appropriable space for both patients and caregivers," Gilliland told Dezeen.

"[It can] serve as an impromptu amphitheater, serving for group announcements, presentations and performances tied to the activities within the ateliers."

"The upper-level corridors wrap this space on either side to create a horseshoe configuration with views below," he added.

The Gilbert Raby Therapeutic Workshops has recently been longlisted in the health and wellbeing project category of Dezeen Awards 2023.

Tolila and Gilliland was founded in 2011 by Gilliland and Gaston Tolila, based in a former warehouse in Paris that the studio renovated for itself.

The photography is by Cyrille Weiner.

Project credits:

Design team:
Architect: Tolila+Gilliland
Environmental engineering: 180 degrés Ingénierie
Structure and systems: Mizrahi SAS
Wood structure engineering: Sylva Conseil
Landscape: Troisième Paysage