How to give a form to memory? How to think a monumental form? How to create a progressive intimacy conducive to meditation while revealing the landscape?
This place of memory dedicated to the sinking of the Tanche, a French trawler that jumped on a German mine on June 19, 1940 at the exit of the harbor of Lorient, attempts to answer these questions. It imposes itself as a witness and an act of reminiscence of this tragic event but also as a permanent trace inscribed in a landscape. This device invites and guides the visitor in a journey made of visual sequences and different atmospheres that follow one another. The importance of the threshold, of the source and direction of the light, of the ability to generate silence are all notions to go through in order to try to provoke an emotion. Here, the roofing element is the one that unites all these aspects. Of monolithic appearance, it is like a mass that oppresses and seems indestructible. From the entrance, its recessed plan creates the threshold, the view is constrained and directed towards the sky: hope, freedom? Thereafter, its curve, reminiscent of a ship's hull, progresses and follows the visitor's path, welcoming him into a central space. Cannons of light pierce the mass and thus illuminate the names of the shipwrecked. These four cylindrical volumes also appeal to the landscape. The end of the course is carried out in an airlock of contemplation whose horizontality is marked by a horizontality is marked by a low ceiling and a wall at half height whose tension suggests half-closed eyes before the drowning.