MARCEL CACHIN QUARTER | BRENAC & GONZALEZ & ASSOCIATES
The project
Description provided by Brenac & Gonzalez & Associates. This development of 185 dwellings for purchase (studios to four-bedroom apartments), distributed between seven collective buildings, are integrated within the project to restructure the Marcel Cachin area, which aims to improve the lived environment of the inhabitants, making the quarter accessible in order to create an urban centre, while respecting the principle of sustainable development.
Organisation of the project
Our project, composed of simple volumes, presents itself as an open block, airy and generous.
The principle of the master plan articulates around a process of volumetric “slicing” guided by the history of the area and by our ambitions for the future of the new quarter. The “point rather than the line.” This volumetric “slicing” represents one of the fundamental elements of our architectural and urban reflection.
At the scale of the city, the fragmentation of volumes allows for an alignment in continuity with the context to be conserved (rue de la République, rue Albert Giry, rue André Malraux and mail Pizzoli) and for the creation of visual escapes that give the block the perception of greater porosity.
At the scale of the block, the volumetric fragmentation allows the question of density to be treated, while generating dwellings of a high quality, blessed with multiple orientations and limited over-sight.
The interruptions between the various built volumes otherwise favour the autonomy of each program and each building, all while conserving a community of use. These opportunities for the eye to escape neutralise the feeling of enclosure in favour of a richness of framings and views into the distance that are offered to inhabitants, passers-by and even the inhabitants of neighbouring blocks.
This new system envisages, therefore, a response to the ambition for porosity and greater accessibility developed by the city for the whole of the Marcel Cachin Quarter, in order to move progressively away from the trauma caused by the housing blocks of the 1960s.
Volumetric slicing is accentuated by an alternation between three building typologies distributed attentively in relation to the surrounding context.
(1) The terraced building_ This building has a protean form. It possesses two emergences on the rue de la République and terraces toward the heart of the block. This volumetric richness allows for a finessed dialogue with the surrounding environment. On the street side, the building rises to six stories, with a crevasse through five levels that allows us to offer large balconies that benefit from the southern sun. Toward the heart of the block, the built mass is diluted progressively thanks to a play of tiered terraces, constituting a more domestic scale and assuring the transition of scale.
(2) Low towers and (3) town houses_ These buildings are composed of two different building typologies: low towers and town houses. The division of the built mass into towers 18 meters thick is the urban form the most advantageous in many respects, permitting the fusion of a high degree of compactness and the production of accumulated surface. The buildings organized as low towers in this way, guarantee double, or even triple orientations to over 90 percent of dwellings. They are thus naturally lit more effectively and better ventilated for an accumulated lived comfort. Additionally, the use of the low tower allows the staging of management units at a human scale, with a limited number of apartments on each story.
On the ground floor, a typology of building resembling the town house are developed. This atypical typology revives the vocabulary of the individual house. Each apartment is directly accessed from the exterior via a private garden on the ground floor. The access to the town houses through their gardens, accessed from the private pedestrian path that traverses the heart of the block diagonally, provides for a genuine use of this inner part of the block, thereby guaranteeing its legitimacy and durability. The association of these two typologies assures a high quality urban façade on the street – rue Albert Giry and rue André Malraux – with dimensions that reflect the scale of the quarter. The metallic cloisters, or “mantilla” generate a filter of intimacy between the housing and the street. They also hide the use of balconies for storage, maintaining the visual quality of the building when viewed from public space.
Organisation of dwellings
In order to bring a high quality of life to a new dense environment, and to respond to the ambitions of the city of Romainville, the project proposes an ambitious approach to the creation of private and collective living spaces. Our reflection led us to produce a diverse range of dwellings, benefiting from multiple orientations. This diversity of products guarantees a social mix within the area.
The gardens, terraces and balconies_ Beyond a search for quality in the treatment of the apartment cellules, the project is dedicated to offering an added value in the quality of private exterior spaces. They constitute both the originality and the specificity of each dwelling and are the lead actors in the story of this new quarter of the city. An “inhabited undergrowth”.
The large majority of dwellings thus benefit from large and varied outside spaces. Certain dwellings (of two and three bedrooms) have large private gardens with terraces on the ground floor, while the town houses offer a patio within the living space. Others have a private access from the apartment to a roof terrace on the fourth floor, equipped with a kitchen and storage for garden furniture. These generous terraces are made possible by the rationalization of technical equipment on the roof. Other dwellings benefit from ample terraces within the building’s crevasse on the second floor.
A few of the dwellings take advantage of atypical exterior spaces such as tree houses distributed around the heart of the block at the summit of the trees. These cabins, that make use of a metal structure, form easily usable annex rooms of nine metres square in the open air. These uncovered spaces are isolated and removed from the facades and reached by a private aerial walkway which participates in the volumetric animation of the garden in the heart of the block. They give the garden the strongly evocative and poetic atmosphere of an “inhabited undergrowth”.
Certain dwellings have balconies protected by wooden slatted structures that are attached directly to the façade, thus allowing the inhabitants to benefit from exterior space while protected from view. As for the dwellings in the terraced building, these benefit from large successive step-backs at each level, generating terraces with a direct view on the largely green heart of the block. More traditional but nonetheless generous diving board balconies punctuate the façade of building B on the rue de la République. Finally, the wooden turret attached to building F offers large covered terraces. Sliding wooden lattice panels allow for adjustment of the degree of privacy of each inhabitant and provide rhythm to the façade.
Project Details
Dwellings: 162
Location: Romainville
Competition: 2012
Delivery: 2017
Client: Bouygues Immobilier
Surface: 10 790 m²
Budget: 17.3 m euros
Sustainable design: BBC, Effinergie
Project lead: Emmanuel Person
Landscape: Jean-Michel Rameau
