Modern techniques had to be used to restore the 1950s ice house on the Brittany coast
The Glacière d’Étel is one of the most iconic buildings in Brittany. With the roof constructed in the shape of waves it produced 60 tons of ice per day for the local port in the 1950s. Its restoration proved quite a challenge as deputy mayor Etienne Pigeon explains.
There was ammonia in the building and ammonia has a tendency to attack concrete, there was also seawater, for about twenty years the building was abandoned, and there were infiltrations through the concrete vaults, so all the concrete had to be redone: we had to clean it, reinforce all the steel, we kept the beams but the boards were broken up and rebuilt. There's still the vaults and the four walls, but all the rest had to be changed.
Among the problems was also finding techniques to renovate concrete, because we realized there've been very few concrete renovation projects. For example, the vaults, which were in poor condition, were reinforced with carbon film and cement underneath. There are very few buildings where there's a carbon sandwich between two layers of cement to reinforce it, and that was the case. So we used very modern techniques to keep this concrete in an old building, and that's what was a bit funny. And then we had samples of the concrete, which went to Toulouse, to laboratories, to check what state the concrete was in: to see if we had to take the restoration further or if what we had done was enough. So it went quite far really, advanced techniques were used.