In 2006, Silène, the low-income housing office of Saint-Nazaire, asked us to work on new habitat forms on three different sites.

One of them is in the Plaisance neighborhood, near the city center.

The lot is wedged in between a dense group of apartment houses built in the 1960s, ground floor plus five stories, low-density subdivisions of individual houses and a sports park.

The request concerns both the creation of new rental housing on this lot, then, in a second phase, the renovation of the apartment houses.

A general urban development plan of the neighborhood envisioned the siting of small collective apartment blocks, ground floor plus four stories, scattered on the lot.

The siting must preserve the views and the passages from the Plaisance apartment houses to the sports park to the west.

In view of the context, we are proposing a semi-collective housing project whose height and density are midway between the surrounding buildings.

The buildings are organized into units of six apartments, with a ground floor and two stories, laid out in a line along the streets or passages, created from east to west.
The rows are about 15 m [50 ft.] Apart, comprising a passage of 4 m [13 ft.] And a private garden from one end to the other.

Parking spaces will be confined to an area near the street: some on the ground floor, under the first buildings, the rest underground and in closed garages, with the cellars.

The passages between the buildings will therefore be pedestrian.

The units are through apartments, north-south, with, on each side, a garden on the ground floor or a balcony and a winter garden on the upper floors.

Their living room-kitchens face south with a 9 m [30 ft.] Glazed facade (for the three-room apartments) on the garden or the winter garden.

The staircases are built in between the units. They serve a maximum of four apartments.

The building system is mixed, composed of:
- a post-beam steel frame
- large-span alveolar concrete slab flooring.
It is a simple and optimized system, made up of repetitive standardized elements that provide the spaces with a great deal of flexibility.
The winter gardens have an exterior façade made of transparent polycarbonate that can open wide.
Their interior faces have sliding aluminum joinery along the entire height.
The bay windows are all equipped with insulating interior thermal curtains.

Comfort is optimized via a combination of “natural” systems that permit good thermal management of the spaces:
- double north / south exposure of the units with facades made entirely of double-glazed windows
- thermal and solar protection through insulating and reflecting curtains,
- winter gardens that
permit sunlight to be captured, - compact heated spaces
- natural ventilation through wide openings in the façades

Here, as elsewhere, our objective is to create modern and spacious housing, avoiding standard apartments,
- to provide additional, intermediate surfaces that broaden use capacities, the varieties of spaces and climatic atmosphere,
- to make collective housing evolve toward the principles that characterize an individual house: verandas, almost individual access, an exterior space extending the rooms.