TAUTEM Architecture Turns a Former Montpellier Daycare into a Social Hub Wrapped Around a Garden

Social service buildings rarely get the architectural attention they deserve. Too often they are fluorescent waiting rooms with laminated signage, places where the building itself seems to apologize for the people inside. Espace Ambroise Croizat, completed in 2026 by TAUTEM Architecture in Montpellier, takes the opposite position. The project transforms the former Center for Social Experimentation and Innovation (CEIS), a site that once held a daycare and had collected a patchwork of buildings from different decades, into what the brief called a "third social space": open, inclusive and calm.

What interests us is less any single gesture than the way the program is arranged. A solidarity grocery, a teaching kitchen, a digital center, modular workshops, social support offices and emergency shelter spaces all share 1,370 m² around a community garden. TAUTEM chose to keep and reveal the existing fabric rather than clear the site. As a result, a vulnerable family arriving for help walks into a place that already belongs to the neighborhood. Dignity here is spatial: the building is generous before anyone says a word.

A Copper Sign on a Quiet Street

From the street, the intervention is restrained. The old plastered facades and portico have been restored, and the only loud move is a pleated copper screen carrying the building's name above a gated passage. It reads as a civic marker without overwhelming the low houses on either side. The fluting catches the Mediterranean sun differently through the day, so even this one element has some depth to it.

The slatted steel gates matter as much as the copper. When open, they frame a direct view through to the garden, so passersby can see trees, not a reception desk. At dusk the arched shopfront glows on the street, and the entrance turns into a lantern. For a building that houses emergency shelter, this kind of visible, ordinary presence on the block is a deliberate social choice.

The Grocery Beneath the Old Arches

The social and solidarity grocery sits on the ground floor under the restored arches and opens onto the city. Produce is stacked on timber shelving set on wheeled crates beneath stone groin vaults, with looping light fixtures overhead. It looks like a neighborhood market, which is exactly the point. A grocery for people on limited incomes that resembles a good corner shop removes the stigma that a stripped-back distribution counter would carry.

The vaulted passages work as thresholds between street and garden. Timber-framed glass walls line the openings, and the barrel and ribbed ceilings direct the eye toward the planting beyond. In a hot climate, a deep covered route like this gives shade and a cool place to pause, and it lets the courtyard be seen from the moment you step inside.

A Timber Wing That Faces the Garden

On the garden side, a new extension joins interior and exterior around a largely open green space. It is clad in vertical timber, with tall timber-framed glazing and an upper gallery. The contrast with the street front is intentional. The public face stays historic and plastered, while the private face is lighter, more porous and visibly contemporary.

The courtyard is where the project earns the phrase "third space." Café tables sit beneath trees, residents gather on the lawn, and the facade looks onto all of it rather than turning away. The young, staked trees are a reminder that the garden is still growing in. We would like to return in ten years, when the canopy has matured and the courtyard is fully shaded.

At dusk, the timber wing glows under its scalloped concrete eaves. Placing the garden at the heart of the plan, instead of on a residual corner, means every program can see it. Offices, kitchen and meeting rooms all share the same view of the lawn.

Scalloped Concrete, Galleries and Terraces

The most distinctive detail of the new work is the scalloped concrete soffit that runs along the galleries and under the stairs. It echoes the arches of the older building in a new language, a ribbed, rhythmic underside that turns a plain circulation slab into something you notice. The white looped balustrades pick up the same curve at hand height.

The upper walkway is an external corridor, which makes sense in Montpellier's climate. Instead of a sealed internal hallway, circulation happens in shade and open air, with bistro chairs placed so the gallery can also serve as a balcony. Timber doors open directly off it, and every room gets a front door onto the garden.

Slatted timber decks and a roof terrace under a large tree canopy extend the usable area outdoors. Vertical timber fins and arched glass panes filter light at the edge. These are modest elements, but they add up to a building that treats outdoor space as part of the program, not leftover margin.

A Teaching Kitchen Built for Gathering

The teaching kitchen is warm in both color and intent. Terracotta cabinets, terrazzo worktops, a steel island and red pendants sit beneath a row of arched windows that look out to the garden stair. It is a room you would want to cook in, and that matters, because the kitchen's job is to bring people together around food rather than simply process meals.

A curved timber counter with a terrazzo backsplash and a wavy light tube under the vault gives the space a soft, slightly playful edge. The adjacent common room, with its grey sofa and terracotta kitchenette, opens directly onto a deck. The palette carries through these rooms and links them without heavy-handed branding.

Care in the Details: Children, Sound and Wayfinding

This is where the commitment to care becomes tangible. An arched wooden wayfinding sign in French guides visitors through corridors lined with concrete columns, and pink felt acoustic baffles hang overhead. A rounded alcove with a pink sofa gives a child a place to read while a parent waits. These are small decisions, but in a building serving people under stress, quiet rooms and clear signage are not luxuries.

The playroom sits behind timber-framed glazing, so supervision is easy without walls closing it off. An orange bench beside a glazed meeting room door offers a place to wait in view of daylight. The bare concrete structure is left honest, while softer materials do the work of comfort at the scale of the body.

Offices and Meeting Rooms That Flex

The support offices and meeting rooms share the language of the rest of the building: vaulted concrete ceilings with wood-faced panels, tall timber windows, tan and ochre curtains. Nothing about them signals bureaucracy. A conversation with a social worker happens in a room with a garden view, and that changes the tone of the exchange.

Folding partitions let one large room become several smaller ones, or open fully for a workshop or assembly. For a program that includes modular workshops and shifting community needs, this flexibility is essential. The sequence shows the same room in three states, and each version feels resolved.

Perforated screens over the windows throw striped light across the floor, a reminder that solar control is built into the facade rather than added later. Even the individual offices open onto wooden balconies, so staff spend their days connected to the same garden as the people they serve.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan and floor plans make the strategy clear: an L-shaped building held along the street, with rooms on both levels opening onto a planted courtyard. The garden is the organizing room of the project, and the plans show how every program faces it.

The sections and elevations show the old tiled-roof volume beside the new timber gallery and steel stair. The east elevation keeps the street's plastered, terracotta-roofed character, while the south elevation reveals the lighter, layered garden facade.

The axonometric presents the arcaded galleries wrapped around curving garden paths. The cross section is the most technically revealing drawing in the set, annotating solar angles, rooftop photovoltaic panels and water retention alongside the shared garden. It indicates that environmental thinking was part of the design from the start, not an afterthought.

Why This Project Matters

Espace Ambroise Croizat argues that social infrastructure deserves the same spatial care as a museum or a library. By keeping the existing buildings, restoring the street front and placing a garden at the center, TAUTEM Architecture has made a place where receiving help does not feel like a lesser experience. The grocery looks like a market, the kitchen looks like a home, and the offices look onto trees.

It is also a strong case for adaptive reuse at the neighborhood scale. Rather than replacing a mixed collection of buildings with a single new block, the project stitches them together and lets each period remain legible. For cities facing rising demand for social services and tighter carbon budgets, that combination of reuse, climate-aware design and dignity is a model worth studying.

Espace Ambroise Croizat by TAUTEM Architecture, Montpellier, France. Area: 1,370 m². Completed: 2026. Photography by Luc Boegly.

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