The Pyrenees, shaped over millennia by natural and vernacular dynamics, gave rise to an architecture profoundly rooted in the landscape: villages set upon alluvial fans, houses arranged into “house-villages” around a common square, buildings fashioned from local materials and devised to minimize physical effort while adapting to the climate. The advent of the Anthropocene broke with these dynamics: the exploitation of fossil fuels and the rise of tourism transformed the mountain into a product, introducing roads, mines, spa resorts and ski stations, as well as a functionalist urbanism detached from its context. The new hamlets, linear and devoid of public spaces, use imported materials and mimic a fantasized mountain. 

Today, the effects of warming and the depletion of resources are leading to the gradual closure of stations and factories, leaving behind abandoned infrastructures and altered landscapes, while inhabitants turn once more toward local ways of life but remain without common gathering spaces. Why not move beyond the opposition between local and global to embrace the “Terrestrial,” a mode of existence grounded in ecological interdependencies? In the Pyrenean valley floors, this would mean recomposing a territory that interweaves nature, heartless hamlets, obsolete infrastructures and abandoned technical objects, in order to rediscover a form of autonomy inspired by ancient vernacular villages while integrating the material legacy of the industrial world.

The Pyrenean valley of Eylie is emblematic of this transformation. For centuries it lived autonomously within its villages, until the extractivist era reorganized it around a major mining operation (1896–1922). Lead was extracted at more than 2,300 meters and carried down by cableway to the Eylie refinery. One hundred and sixty workers were employed there, housed in hamlets built along the ore road, without public spaces—judged unnecessary and irrelevant to industrial productivity. Today, these hamlets shelter roughly five hundred inhabitants engaged in farming, herding and tourism, yet still dependent on Sentein for essential services. The site, marked by abandoned infrastructures and the absence of gathering places, illustrates this third paradigm.

Reactivating the refinery requires an understanding of its original organization. The site forms a mosaic of buildings set upon a 23-degree slope, each fulfilling a precise function. A structural grid of 2.5 by 2.5 meters orders the whole, founded on stone plinths and a larch timber frame. Today, the buildings, exposed to the harsh conditions of mid-altitude climate, are severely degraded. The builders had transposed models from the lowlands that proved incapable of resisting snow, wind or intense sunlight.

A reflection has begun on reinventing a model for an autonomous village center. In traditional communities, the common square ensures independence; yet the hamlets of Eylie, built solely to house workers, possess none. Inspired by the concept of idiorythmy — in which each person lives according to their own rhythm — we wish to offer inhabitants not an imposed program, but shared spaces: flexible, available, and open-ended.

Jean-Pierre Le Goff underscores the importance of living together, and the harmful effects of insularity in modern villages, often reduced to secondary residences devoid of communal spaces. The project seeks, on the contrary, to restore a place of sociability.

The former refinery, at the heart of the hamlets, becomes this gathering place devoted to activities not oriented toward profit. An archetypal program — fairground barn, washhouse, refuge, workshops — acts as points of acupuncture reinforcing the autonomy of the valley floor. The new pavilions, independent yet visually and physically connected by pathways, draw inspiration from the plan of the Abbey of Saint Gall to organize the spaces with clarity. Two severely damaged buildings are dismantled, revealing three preserved structures around which two new volumes create a central square. Three levels of use structure the site: a public square and workshops below, a more intimate intermediate terrace with pool and technical facilities, and a refuge above.

The landscape extends the structural grid of the built ensemble, incorporating local trees to frame views and water-collection systems that feed the washhouse, sanitary facilities and filtration basins.

The site is conceived as a contemporary biotope, integrating topography, hydrography, wind and sunlight to orient, ventilate and open the pavilions. Local materials — wood, stone, bio-sourced resources — are complemented by extensive reuse. Industrial objects left on site (tanks, pipelines, cables, structures) are catalogued to be given new functions without heavy transformation. The dismantling of buildings also yields site concrete, trusses, cladding, metal sheets and schist. These materials form the foundation of the project, supplemented when necessary with local wood to ensure structural rigidity.