The Rairies-Montrieux production site is located near Rairies, straddling the Sarthe and Maine-et-Loire departments. It is named after the family who founded the company, which specialises in terracotta, in 1910. Invited by the brand, AA visited this earthenware ‘kitchen’, and above all, one of its latest collaborations, a work by Raphaël Zarka on a site undergoing conversion near Angers.

Léa Giamberini

Located in a region where clay is abundant, the company’s five open-cast quarries extract the red clay needed to manufacture its products: bricks, briquettes, tiles and wafers. In terms of research and development, the company is also developing prototypes of terracotta bricks in a variety of shapes, including rounded, flat and multi-angled, as well as different sizes, thicknesses and colours. The company recently came into the limelight with the delivery of seven buildings for the Village des Athlètes in Saint-Ouen, featuring clay brick facings, custom-designed with the group of architects coordinated by uapS architecture office.

Not far from this motherland, in Trélazé to the south-east of Angers, a former match factory is currently being converted by the Latitude agency. Near the first deliveries, former industrial halls converted into housing, the work of visual artist Raphaël Zarka, La Doublure, soars nearly 24 metres and magnifies the preserved heritage. The company brought us here because it supplied the 36,000 bricks needed to build it.

Inspired by the remains of a truncated brick chimney used to make matches, the artist used it as the pillar of a slab suspended five metres high. A new chimney, a ‘lining’ for the old one, is set into the same slab, with its base open to the outside. Inside, no fewer than 11,000 unusual bricks, moulded in 8 models specially designed for the project, were needed to create a monumental spiral, an ode to the movement so dear to Zarka. This is not Zarka’s first time working with bricks: in 2011 he created the Cenotaph of Archimedes, two 2.36 metre high twisted columns in terracotta.

Raphaël Zarka, La Doublure, 2023, 2310 × 1970 × 1100 cm. Architecte : ASBR. Trélazé, Maine et Loire, France.

www.rairies.com
www.latitude-archi.com
www.raphaelzarka.com

On 21 and 22 September, the site of the former Trézalé match factory is organising guided tours as part of the European Heritage Days. More information on their website.