Ancien collège Cassini, puis collège Jean-Fernel — Clermont

In 1935 the town of Clermont acquired the Belle-Assise estate, owned by the heirs of the industrialist Charles Gervais, to create a low-cost housing estate there, and then decided to build a school for the boys of the district in the former park. The competition was won by the architect Lucien Daboval, based in Méru, and his Clermont partners Jean Nimbeau and Victor-Nestor Boudoux; the foundation stone was laid on 10 July 1938 and the school, still under construction, was hastily inaugurated on 27 April 1940. According to the French heritage inventory, the complex, marked by its rotunda to the south, borrows as much from the “ocean-liner style” of Art Deco as from the Modern Movement, and is directly inspired by the Belgian pavilion that Daboval designed for the 1937 World Exhibition. The reinforced-concrete day-school block, on three levels, alternates structural elements and large glazed areas, underlined by bands of emerald-green glazed tiles, and ends to the south in a glazed semicircular section fitted out as a lecture theatre; the former boarding wing, at right angles to the north, has four levels. Disused since 2001, the building was studied in 2021 by the French general heritage inventory (Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel) as part of an emergency operation, when it was threatened with demolition. The façades and roofs of the two wings designed by Daboval and the entrance hall with its two monumental staircases were registered as a historic monument by order of 8 June 2021.

Translated from the French original.