Near the old Suchard factory, the student accommodation building is located on a long plot delimited on one side by the Usines Street and on the other by an almost twenty meters high cliff, below Chemin de la Papéterie.
This strong topographical constraint has become the central theme of the project. The building is set back from the cliff. The slender and vertical space thus created becomes the singular heart of the project. This "atrium" is a distributive space, but above all a collective outdoor space for everyone. One can access accommodations and common areas through outdoor walkways that sometimes deforminto platforms that join the cliff,thus becoming outdoor spaces that interact between floors.
The living rooms and kitchens of the accommodations overlook thewalkways. The east-facing rooms are separated from the day area by the sanitary facilities. These rooms are organized in apartments for one, two, or three students. At the head of the building, accommodations with four bedrooms are specially designed forphysically disabled people. Maximum functional and constructive optimization was sought: repetitive modules and prefabricated sanitary cells.
In plan, the building adapts to the urban morphology. The long length of the building folds to accompany the layout of Usines Street and modulate the scale of the building. The language chosen for the facades is inspired by the industrial architecture of the 19th century: clearly marked and rhythmic structure, adequacy between form and function, materialization in relation to the technique of its time. The facade on the Usines Street shows, through a set of frames, the functional organization of the plan in one, two, three or four-bedroom units.
Materials Used :
1. Load-bearing interior walls and slabs: reinforced concrete
2. Walkway: reinforced concrete with insulating console
3. Façade: wood structure and fiber cement
4. Windows: wood-metal
5. Roof covering: green roof with solar panels
6. Sun protection: vertical awnings and slat blinds
7. Prefabricated sanitary cells
8. Interior: concrete, wood flooring
