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Architects: MARS Architectes
- Area: 802 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Charly Broyez
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Lead Architects: Julien Broussart, Sylvain Rety, Raphaël Renard
Text description provided by the architects. The boulevard Poniatowski establishes itself inside the former city wall of Thiers, one of the reasons allowing the creation of a way at this scale. The quality of the boulevard Poniatowski lies in its clarity: alignment of the building, large and wooded sidewalk linked with commercials ground floors allowing a direct connection between the public and private space, between solid and void. An urban continuity emanating from guidelines of classic urbanism widely resumed by Haussmann which made and is still making the quality of a city like Paris.
Regarding our isle and especially the composition of the nearby buildings, we notice a composition system based: On a horizontal pace of opening, where a large window alternate with two small ones, and on an order of the facade divided into three parts, with a substructure composed of the ground floor and the mezzanine floor, the main part usually constituted with R2 to R8 levels and of the penthouse. Even if they are different from one another in their architectural design (material, ornaments,...), this composition system allows giving scale and life to a clear and homogenous boulevard.
The project inserts itself in this approach of urban continuity by the repossession of the pace of openings and compositions in 3 orders by a volumetric deformation. This way, the main body lifts away from the substructure by a subtle bending overhanging on the boulevard and allowing clear views at the front end of the building, announcing a breach and the entrance. The penthouse, designed remote, correlated with the surrounding zinc roofs, expresses itself by a plan using triangle geometry to erase the depth using perspective effects.
The openings are implanted respecting the rhythm of the nearby windows and linked with the inside typology of the housings. We are proposing vertical and rectangular windows offering to clearly see the street as much as the sky. They are enhanced by metallic shutters allowing solar protection and intimacy.
The architectural style of this project is different from the nearby buildings but inserts itself in the mutual scale of this boulevard. It takes part in formalizing this public space in a method looking for contextuality and urbanity, convinced that apprehending the spirit of a place can only exist in the accuracy of the connections of the smallest part to the whole. The project plays on the ambiguity between material and ornament, by working with a matrixed concrete on the entire façade.
By superimposing and multiplying the drawings of the neighboring buildings, the facade finds a new ornament in its own material, where a multitude of readings are possible: from a distance, we only feel a vibration, from close up we begin to recognize certain patterns, then by moving, they disappear to become a vibrating material again. Through this, the building weaves subtle, sometimes mysterious links with its neighbors, avoiding the pitfalls of “pastiche” or “facadism”. This positive revaluation of the ornament creates the fertile ground for a cultural revaluation of the meticulous, of the marginal, of their aesthetics, and of the poetry which emerges from it.
