The Art Pipe

Le Havre carries its industrial history in its silhouette. Church towers, factory stacks, port cranes, storage silos — the city’s skyline is a catalogue of cylindrical forms accumulated over a century of Norman coastal industry. This is not coincidental architectural repetition. It is a structural logic, a material culture that the city developed in response to the same forces — wind, sea pressure, load distribution — that make the cylinder the most efficient form for a coast that has endured violent Atlantic storms since before Perret rebuilt it in 1947. The Art Pipe competition proposal took this observation as its generative premise: that the appropriate architectural response to Le Havre’s iconic concrete arch was not contrast but continuation — a new form that speaks the same formal language the city already knows.

Location          Le Havre, France
Type              Cultural Museum — Competition Entry
Status            Competition Winner
Year              2024
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Arch Span         270 m length / 21.5 m height
Scope             Architecture, Cultural Program, Adaptive Reuse

The urban analysis conducted as part of the design process mapped Le Havre’s cylindrical inventory systematically — church towers, industrial stacks, port infrastructure, the city’s flag iconography. What emerged was not simply a formal observation but a structural argument: the cylinder is Le Havre’s answer to coastal exposure. It minimizes surface area against wind, distributes lateral loads efficiently, and ages honestly in salt air without the maintenance demands of flat-surface or angular construction. The city built cylindrically because cylindrical forms survive here. The Nautilus Pipe continues this survival logic at a cultural scale.

The new structure does not alter the arch. This was a non-negotiable design position. The visual integrity and material texture of the 1947 concrete are preserved in full — the addition floats above and within the arch’s span on a lightweight steel-and-glass system that makes its structural independence from the original form legible at every point. The arch retains its dominant presence. The Nautilus Pipe is precisely calibrated so that its form reads as a guest within the arch’s space rather than a replacement of it. At night, when the transparent sections of the cylindrical museum illuminate from within, the arch becomes the frame through which the cultural program is seen — inverting the relationship between container and content that the original industrial structure embodied.

The Nautilus Pipe is organized across three levels connected by a continuous spiral circulation path. This spiral is not a decorative choice — it is the section logic of the cylinder applied to vertical movement. A visitor who enters at ground level and rises through the building via the spiral does not experience the building as a stack of floors but as a single continuous surface that happens to change elevation. The movement mimics the city’s own formal logic: continuous, curved, without sharp transitions. Ground level holds the public exhibition and gathering spaces — the floor that belongs to the city, open and accessible from the port edge. The mezzanine level opens the spiral to panoramic views of Le Havre’s urban landscape and the Norman coast beyond, the transparent sections of the cylindrical wall converting the act of moving through the building into a sequence of framed views. The upper level accommodates events, workshops, and cultural performances in a flexible configuration that can transition between these programs without physical reconfiguration.

The spiral roof design admits natural light through the cylindrical form’s upper sections, distributing diffused daylight across the interior without the direct solar exposure that a flat-roofed museum of equivalent footprint would receive. The reinforced steel and glass construction provides the structural transparency that allows the 1947 arch to remain visually present through the new addition — the industrial past readable through the cultural present at every point in the building’s section. The concrete base that anchors the Nautilus Pipe connects it to the arch’s existing infrastructure while maintaining the structural independence that makes the addition reversible — a condition that the conservation logic of the project required from the outset.

The landscape design around the arch is deliberately minimal. This was a decision rather than a constraint. The site’s power lies in the relationship between the arch’s 270-meter span and the Norman coastal horizon — any landscape design that competed with this relationship would diminish it. The approach uses subtle green areas and pedestrian pathways that orient visitors toward the arch and the sea rather than toward the landscape design itself. The port edge remains the primary spatial experience. The museum is the cultural layer added to it. The landscape is the transition between the two.

The Art Pipe belongs to a body of competition work at INJ Architects in which the identity of a place — its formal history, its material culture, its structural logic — is treated as the generative source of the design rather than as context to be acknowledged and moved past. The methodology governing this type of culturally grounded competition proposal is detailed in how-we-work. For cultural institutions, municipalities, and development bodies considering adaptive reuse or cultural landmark commissions of comparable complexity, the engagement framework is outlined in bespoke-architecture.