The founding act of the project begins with the landscape. It is rare in Paris to be able to take advantage of panoramic views without vis-à-vis. Yet here the site overlooks two distant landscapes: the city and the suburbs.
The site plan combines the qualities of the site and the density of the program in order to provoke recesses and gaps in the built volume that reveal the landscape at the heart of the block. This improves the natural lighting for the common spaces and the housing units.
The façade along the canal is generously open and transparent in order to express the pleasure of living there. The majority of the apartments have double orientations, with windows on opposite sides of the building. Some have exterior terraces while others offer an extension to the apartment in the form of a closed loggia that creates a thermal buffer zone as well as an extra room.
The building on MacDonald Boulevard is inserted into a gap between the neighboring building, which is remarkable for the deep recesses in its façade, and the future program.
The abstraction of its façade, which is a rapid transition between the volumes and the existing or future decorative elements, substitutes the domestic scale of the housing units with an impressionist composition of alternating hues of lacquered aluminum. In order to be protected from the tumult of the street, the façade is thick and frames distant views that are both direct and reflected across the mirrored parts of the shutters. The two facades live at the rhythm of its use by the inhabitants.
The daycare nursery on the ground floor was conceived around the atrium, the symbolic heart and home to many of the young children’s activities. It offers a large versatility of uses and pedagogical options while facilitating relationships between different classes.
A first in Paris, this innovative public building is a pilot project for questions concerning accessibility. Its conception contributes to removing handicap barriers by instituting specific measures that aim to integrate into the normal education cycle the children that are typically oriented towards specialized schools.
