L'HÔTEL DU DÉPARTEMENT

Formerly a teacher training college, this imposing building was built outside the old town at the end of the 19th century. Since 1991, it has housed the departmental headquarters after being redesigned by the architect Dominique Perrault. Located beyond the old walls and the Porte-aux-Bois, which allowed the entrance to the upper town when coming from Saint-Dizier and the kingdom of France, the pâquis - or pasture - is a place where the inhabitants of the district come to seek the shade of the multi-century old trees that compose it. In 1883, the Barisian architect Micault began construction on this site of a building intended to house the teacher training college. Its classically inspired architecture consists of a long building flanked by four pavilions, thus forming an H-shaped plan. The Savonnières stone contrasts with the high slate roofs pierced with curved pediment dormers. Only the central bay of the facade, which receives specific ornamentation, breaks the regularity and sobriety of the openings. On either side of the central body were originally a courtyard and a garden. Transformed into a military hospital during the First World War, the building housed a German prison from 1940 to 1944, where the department's resistance prisoners were held. After the construction of a mixed teacher training school in 1963 on the Pilviteuil heights, it served as an annex school until its closure in 1988. In a political context of decentralization of the State's missions, the premises devoted to the General Council at the prefecture became cramped. The architect Dominique Perrault, who later designed the François Mitterrand site of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, was commissioned to adapt the old school into a functional and modern place that could accommodate the diversity of departmental services. A large square opens onto the public space and the first floor is treated as transparent in order to lighten the heavy 19th century façade. At the rear, a modern building has been created for the use of elected officials. Façade and roof form a single glazed unit of a building with circular forms. Between the two, above a mirror-like water feature, a footbridge symbolically links the two parts of the hotel, the old and the contemporary, the legislative and the executive.