Description

This new residential complex in Romainville, eight kilometres east of downtown Paris, aims to be more than just a ZAC, a Zone d’Aménagement Concerté, as the many mostly contextless new housing developments built in and around the French capital in recent decades are called. The white, simple forms of the new complex are arranged around the perimeter of a block and fitted into the local context. What sets the complex apart are the striking elements facing the courtyard: cube-like balconies enclosed in wooden lattices stand on slender stilts and project deep into the courtyard in the interior of the block.

This focus on the exterior spaces is not by chance. As elsewhere in France, the role of the architect has drifted away from the designer of masterful interiors to that of a painter of façade landscapes. Standards, regulations, clients and building constraints now largely determine the structure and floor plan of low-cost housing. The demands of barrier-free accessibility, while certainly justified, now result in bathrooms that are as large as bedrooms and living rooms that have shrunk correspondingly to the size of bedrooms. Even the best architect finds themselves focussing on designing the areas adjacent to or outside the home. Where housing in the past had balconies, today sales catalogues wax lyrical about terraces or loggias contributing to the quality of living. Many of the residential projects built in the environs of Paris are variations on the same theme of extending the living space to the outside. As apartments grow smaller and cellars ever scarcer, many residents have only their balconies as an extension of their living area.

Brenac & Gonzalez have responded to this need by separating the balcony cubes from the living space by a walkway and shifting them a few metres into the courtyard. It is up to the residents whether they use these 9 m² “cages” as green, shaded balconies or as storage space. In both cases they are an asset to the residents, who retain their privacy in the middle of the courtyard without having to resort to parasols or clumsy metal and plastic partitions to ensure their privacy. By distributing the overall volume of the residential block over four to six-storey structures, the architects respond to the eaves height and density of the surroundings. Most of the seven buildings are divided into two parts above a base storey, which ensures all 161 apartments have light from different sides. In the courtyard, which has entrances on three sides of the block, the planners fenced off small terraces and green areas for the ground floor apartments. Next to them are the steel supports of the wooden cubes, which flank the main path through the courtyard like different-height tree houses. The same larch latticework surrounds the regular, roofed balconies that the majority of the apartments have. Wood and balconies are therefore the dominant theme of the complex, at least as far as the courtyard is concerned, gracing as a recurring element the otherwise simple housing concept.

The project is the product of a private developer. In France, private building initiatives rarely stand for high quality, while social housing construction is often much better and even well-regarded internationally. But this pattern is slowly changing. On the one hand, the government has relaxed the obligation for public housing associations to put their projects out to public tender. Instead, they can choose their architects, which does not necessarily improve quality. At the same time, more and more private developers are discovering competitions as an effective procurement method. This is not always motivated by a wish for better-quality designs but because they hope the project will be well-received by the authorities or that they stand a better chance of being awarded the contract for a particularly prize piece of land. Some observers are convinced that in the end this will also benefit the future residents.

Originally published in Bauwelt 17.2018, pp. 26-29, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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