Description

Grenoble has a fantastic panorama. From one of the spherical “bubbles” of the Téléphérique cable car, the quickest and most comfortable way up to the “Bastille”, one has a particularly good view of the Alpine basin. From here one’s gaze passes over the medieval city centre and historical quarters laid out by Haussmann to the “three towers”, a group of apartment blocks built for the 1968 Olympic Games by the architects Roger Anger, Pierre Puccinelli, Michel Loyer, Charles Pivot, Pierre Junillon and Mario Heymann. As the cable car ascends about half-way up, the “Presqu’île” comes into view, a peninsula at the end of which is the confluence of the rivers Isère and Drac. At this point, a quarter of an hour by tram from the city, a new quarter is being built to a master plan by Christian de Portzamparc. The “high-rise city” is conceived as an eco-quarter, and its most prominent building is the “Tour Panache”, a high-rise apartment block designed by Edouard François.

The top six floors of the fifty-metre-high, copper-clad building are crowned by a cascade of terraces that project in all directions. The concept of separating indoor and outdoor living spaces soon becomes clear. Each of the 52 flats has its own roof terrace with an adjoining kitchenette so that the prominent views of the surrounding peaks and valleys and back towards the city and along the river courses are distributed fairly among the residents of all floors. Owners or tenants of the lower floors therefore also benefit, albeit with different-sized terraces. The success of the concept has since led the architect to employ similar, lushly planted terraced upper floors on other projects, such as the residential tower on Boulevard Périphérique in Paris.

The flats are reached by a narrow, carpeted corridor, and there are four flats per floor, one on each corner of the building. The floor plans are very plain: a corridor leads to a kitchen-living room, passing an inner-lying bathroom and providing access to between one and four rooms. The maisonettes on the eleventh and twelfth floors offer the potential for more interesting floor plans. Of particular interest are the technical installations that result in the building exceeding French climate targets. Alongside the computers that monitor energy use and requirements based on solar and geothermal energy, the custom-developed corner windows are the other noteworthy feature, not least because they are so defining for the atmosphere of the living rooms. The otherwise relatively small window openings in the concrete shell are – leaving aside the material’s inherently problematic carbon balance – a simple means of climate-neutral construction, as is the separation of the terraces from the heated living areas, eliminating the problem of thermal bridges.

The district adjoins a technology campus. The neighbours of the new, green residential quarter are an electronics manufacturer and some of the university’s research institutes – most notably its circular particle accelerator.

Originally published in Bauwelt 22.2019, pp. 32-35, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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