16 Social Housing Units Urban Refurbishment / a/LTA

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: a/LTA
Area: 1100 m²
Year: 2014
Photographs:Fabrice Dehoche
Engineering: Zebra 3, Barthes Bois

Text description provided by the architects. The installation site and more widely the Promenade de Warenne in the district of Manchester (urban refurbishment) in Charleville-Mézières, has exceptional qualities and very good views on very far landscape. The presence of luxuriant vegetation , the soft topography from North to South are typical of a site with particular specificities that it is better to respect, to emphasize through the architecture, the volumetry. Instinctively, we thought of centering views, of offering favorable orientations. From the outside, houses in strips are playing with the transparency, the porosities on the landscape. The vegetalized roofs are deleting the limit between constructed masses and distant surroundings.

16 Social Housing Units Urban Refurbishment / a/LTA - Image 2 of 33 — © Fabrice Dehoche

The design of the project is based on a first intention: to offer a layout which is in harmony with the particularities of the territory. We shall work on a “landscape project” in continuity with the urban intentions of the sector ANRU (developed by the City of Charleville-Mézières and the urban planner François Daune). While respecting and integrating the intimacy of inhabitants, the project aims to offer a balance between the residents. It is pleasant and inviting and is generating meetings. The use of high-quality materials promotes the “ well-being together “. Our answer to the program means creation of collective practices and social link while respecting people’s autonomy.

PROJECT / INTENTIONS Our first intention on was to protect existing vegetation the site, while working on an architectural development in continuity with the urban intentions of the area (North / South pedestrian ways) and leaning on the school equipment (North of the site). So, the urban network is extended to the site and bends itself to welcome the program. Furthermore, we imagined this site, as a territory with its own urban rules. A principle of privative accesses by transverse alleys is created….

Another orientation was to work on the thickness / porosities, on sets of filters between units, gardens and common spaces. The project is adding 3 strips of two adjoining buildings separated by semipublic alleys. These constituted houses slide according to the limits on avenues Dehuz and Warenne. The alternation of the slopes of roofs constitutes the confirmation of this work in strips which opens on the sports plain of Warenne to the South of the site. Next the internal alleys a set of wooden grids (height of the ground floor 2.70m) filters the views and protects the gardens but allows the exchanges, the link between the neighbors.

Fences in the South of gardens will gradually be colonized by luxuriant vegetation protective from the outer looks. Everything here is built on the same principles, on the same “vocabulary”. The wooden grids decline in regular interval the wooden skin’s blades of houses (one on two).and extend uninterrupted, integrating small doors of electric blocks. We dealt with the facades in a homogeneous way, as a whole, without distinction of programming ( small or big accommodation).