Giant trapeze of nearly 5 hectares, the lot comes between two antagonistic landscapes of the city. To the South, a heteroclite patchy plot, to the North, a uniform alignment of massive towers of social housing. These, seven to twelve stories high, stand on the edge of a large garden city built in the sixties. The vast terrain of the operation offers an opportunity to pacify urban autistic tissues to one another and gives enough space to reconcile the two territories. To suture the shores, three axes of transverse traffic are created, including a central pedestrian street that serves the equipment
sports and schools, half elementary and maternal.
The four schools, mainly on the ground floor, are nestled under a vast carpet of greenery offering at the sight of the inhabitants an inaccessible raised square, but unifying. To orientate in this vast ensemble, volumes pierce and emerge from the broad vegetal plate, creating punctual double heights, spatial breaths, openings towards the sky, while pointing out the particular elements of the programs located at first floor. The sports complex is also federated under a single and gigantic metallic envelope.
Alternately dilated, dug or curved, as if deformed by the presence of its multiple functions - dojo, gymnasium, evolution area, tennis court - the building has however, nothing of a monolith. This amiable diplodocus is structured by a skeleton of glue-laminated wood, with very long-range. Its metal skin evokes a pleated Issey Miyake, precisely adjusted according to an impeccably cut pattern. The whole set, schools and sports complex, all in soft and undulating curves, creates a new peaceful artificial landscape embodying the ambition of a shared urban, social and educational environment, favourable to the well-being of its users.
