Officially opened in the spring of 2011, L’Astrada is a music venue and home to the renown Marciac jazz festival which, prior to its construction, had no permanent quarters to stage the international artists who come to perform each year. The new concert hall was part of a wider project for the town as a cultural pole. The new building is grafted onto the existing grid layout and the result, while it refuses to unsettle the order of the town’s urban composition, does, like so many of King Kong’s designs, offer elements of surprise. The concert hall itself is an unpretentious building which slips effortlessly into the context of the town’s Medieval past, rubbing shoulders with a number of interesting architectural vestiges of a religious nature. Some shed light on the Meridional Gothic architecture once the vogue in the Gers region and to an ensuing taste for formal rigour and economy of means. The building’s exterior cladding is at once smooth and forceful, the distilled embodiment of the fertile substance deposited through the centuries of the town’s architectural past. The concrete casing creates both forceful and gentle contrasts with the natural wood also used. Its shades vary with the shifting atmospheric conditions, creating a rich dialogue between yesterday and tomorrow, redolent with unceasingly renewed sensations. L’Astrada has something of the jazz club about it while still functioning as a major concert hall. It establishes a balance between compact space, with the spectators in close reach of the musicians, within a sufficiently ample volume for excellent acoustics to be provided.
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