La Source Vive

La Source Vive grew out of Aline Foriel-Destezet’s wish to create a space wholly devoted to music, extending the legacy of La Grange au Lac — the pine-and-red-cedar hall built by Patrick Bouchain in 1993 on the hillsides above Lake Geneva, in Évian. Évian’s connection to music goes back to 1976, when Antoine Riboud — then chairman of BSN, the company that would become Danone — founded a festival whose artistic direction was entrusted in 1985 to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The Rencontres Musicales d’Évian grew into a landmark event, until the maestro stepped down in 2000. The festival was revived in 2014 at the initiative of Laurent Sacchi, under the artistic direction of the Quatuor Modigliani and, today, the violinist Renaud Capuçon. Drawn to the place and its history in 2017, Aline Foriel-Destezet launched an ambitious project in 2021 in partnership with Évian Resort. Patrick Bouchain took on the role of artistic director alongside Renaud Capuçon, and invited Philippe Chiambaretta to design the building with him. Resolutely contemporary, built for chamber music with its 500 seats and set discreetly within a preserved woodland, La Source Vive joins La Grange au Lac to form a musical ensemble unlike any other: Les Mélèzes — led by Alexandre Hémardinquer and built on excellence, transmission and openness to audiences of every kind.

La Source Vive is the result of a singular collaboration between two architects bound by a long friendship and by approaches that are deliberately complementary. Where La Grange au Lac was a light structure set on the slope, with a fairground aesthetic and timber as its only material, La Source Vive is a partly buried hall — more mineral, more technically complex, and designed to host concerts and recordings year-round. Patrick Bouchain’s intuitive empiricism, rooted in the craft of making, here combines with the analytical, science-driven method of Philippe Chiambaretta and his practice PCA-STREAM. Both share the conviction that research and experimentation lie at the heart of architecture: the project went through countless iterations, models and simulations, carried out with the internationally renowned acoustician Albert Xu — who had shaped the acoustics of La Grange au Lac with Patrick Bouchain, and who died at the very start of construction. Under project manager Salomé Rigal and Sébastien Truchot, associate architect at PCA-STREAM, a large design team developed the formal and technical solutions. A digital twin of the building, refined throughout the design process, allowed the acoustic engineering firm Meta to anticipate and then verify, at each major stage, measurable results — reverberation time, clarity, lateral efficiency. The structure nests like an onion: a shell of concrete and plaster wrapped in a timber envelope clad in copper. The construction site itself became the place of making, where everything was drawn to measure and shaped by hand, in constant dialogue with the craftspeople.

Structurally, La Source Vive is made up of several layers, like an onion. A concrete base houses the seating and the stage; this base is topped by an acoustic shell in concrete, insulated and finished on its inner face with moulded plaster. On the outside, this first envelope is surrounded by a technical and thermal cavity, separating it from a second shell — a timber structure supporting the outer skin (insulation and battens) and, finally, a copper roof.

This intricate design — a concrete-and-plaster shell nested within an outer timber shell clad in copper — delivers highly effective thermal and acoustic insulation. Sharing cooling equipment with La Grange au Lac, together with a connection to the district heating network, helps optimise the hall’s energy consumption.

La Source Vive is a building conceived as an instrument, designed to achieve a form of acoustic perfection at the meeting point of science and art. Its shape — oval in plan, conical in section — and its volume (11 m³ per listener) circulate sound optimally, rising from a circular base dictated by the site to a shell-like form converging on an asymmetrical apex. Guided by the violinist Renaud Capuçon toward a supple, silky sound, it brings together, for the first time, the two great types of classical hall: the rectangular “shoebox” — to which La Grange au Lac belongs — and the “vineyard” hall, with sloping tiers arranged around the musicians, for an experience that is ideal in every respect, both musical and visual. The materials favour the natural and the local: raw plaster applied in varying densities to achieve a reverberation time of around 1.8 seconds, pink beech wood, pre-patinated copper for the roof, and leather on the custom-designed seats. An oculus — a rare feature — opens the hall to the sky and lets in daylight, making it possible to rehearse in natural conditions, something very few music halls allow. Immersive and bathed in light, set within a woodland enriched by more than 150 trees and 200 shrubs as part of a landscape project carried out with Coloco, La Source Vive offers artists and audiences alike a total experience.