The Big Tables

Brownfields + Cultural

La Friche - Les Grandes Tables

Big Tables - La Friche la Belle de Mai - Marseille 13

Project managementThe Big Tables
Surface500 m2
Cost 2 000 000 € HT
Project managementLead Architect: Caractére spécial
Project Manager: Matthieu PLACE
Date2006
MissionComplete

Construction of the restaurant Les Grandes Tables de la Friche (400 seats) with bar and mezzanine in the former Roller Room.

Because the cuisine brings people together and the Friche lacked centrality, Fabrice Lextrait and Philippe Foulquié (two of the historical founders) programmed a restaurant as a place of polarity in 2004.


The chosen site is a dark room in the factory, called the Roller Room. ARM makes it a huge restaurant bathed in light with large glass or opalescent windows, on the scale of the place (500 m2, 5 meters high ceilings). Its terrace continues in a corridor; it is a buffer between the railway tracks and the restaurant, but also a passage leading to the Jobin courtyard, 8 metres below. It extends the spatial arrangement of the network of streets set up by the architects.


The atmosphere enjoys adapted acoustics and the intervention of artists in residence. Pierre Gatoni has covered the cinder block walls in places with a grid of coloured segments. Here again, as with the Algecos du Campement, the cinder block becomes something different from what was expected.


The restaurant, like all the other operations, was carried out with maximum economy of means and benefited from the help of the Friche technicians.

The "Grandes Tables" participate in the dynamics of the Friche by inviting cooks in residence and regional agricultural producers or winegrowers. Since then, "Les Grandes Tables" have spread to other cultural venues in France, including 104 in Paris (with ARM, but also on Seguin Island in Boulogne, La Criée in Marseille, the Channel and La Dentelle in Calais).