Architects MaO architectes and Tectône are positioning their work as the first residential complex implemented in France, where its future users were involved in the design process. This methodology is natural when working for an individual customer, but for obvious reasons it is not applied on a larger scale: the appearance of a tenant of an apartment building before the appearance of the house itself is possible only with cooperative construction or, as happened in Nanterre, with a social program to support citizens with modest incomes. buying a home for the first time in their lives (in this case, we are talking about a loan of the PAS type, prêt d'accession sociale). Typologically, the building is a "co-housing" (cooperative housing, co-housing) - an apartment building with a set of common premises for all residents.
The 1580 m2 area includes 15 apartments and shared spaces: an underground garage, a laundry room, a workshop, a multi-purpose hall used as a bicycle storage and play area, and a communal living room with a kitchen and a terrace. Common spaces are located not only inside the building, but also outdoors: the courtyard-garden between the buildings, the bridge connecting the buildings and the wide galleries is not a “transit zone”, but a “stop”, a place of intersection and communication of residents, an integral part of the living environment …
Six of the 15 apartments have a separate entrance from the ground and a front garden; the rest of the apartments can be accessed from the galleries, and the lack of a front garden is compensated by open terraces and a garden plot in the courtyard. The house has 6 two-level and 9 one-level variously blocked apartments with two, three and four bedrooms. Each apartment has an individual layout, but it is rather regulated by the number of rooms, location in the building and the way it is arranged with neighboring apartments than by the wishes of the owners. The only important parameter identifying the preferences of future residents is the location of the kitchen area. Only three families chose a completely isolated kitchen, three more residents settled on a partial partition, and in nine apartments the kitchen forms a single room with a dining-living room. More than half of the future tenants chose a large space over fragmentation.
The two spaced volumes fit well into the existing two- and three-story line of individual houses along the narrow Ampere street, typologically linking its development with apartment buildings at a distance. The load-bearing frame is made of ceramic bricks, CLT-panels are used as the roof structure, the roof is zinc, the facade is faced with painted spruce strips.
