The apartment building designed by Farshid Moussavi Architecture is the first residential building in downtown Paris in thirty years. It appeared as part of the Jardins de l'Arche complex - "Gardens of the Arch" - and occupied a very unusual and noticeable area. Its long southern façade opens onto the "historical axis" that runs from the Louvre through the Champs Elysees and passes under the Grande Arche. Thanks to the rotation of this facade by two degrees, residents of the house will be able to admire this wonderful perspective from the balconies. Also, distant views open to them from other sides, since the house is adjacent to the cemeteries of Putau and Neuilly, which do not block the panoramas at all.
However, the most interesting thing about the house is not its plot, but the variety of housing types. The lower part is occupied by commercial functions (five sections) and also a student dormitory (110 rooms) that enlivens the surrounding area, above them there are 72 “affordable” apartments and nine social ones for the residents of the city of Nanterre, where this part of La Defense is located. The building is completed by ten commercial penthouses. Such a social mixture is in the spirit of the Parisian apartment buildings before the reconstruction of Baron Haussmann, the authors of the project emphasize.
The facades, where protruding tiers with loggias, covered with aluminum screens, and shaded "niche" floors with balconies alternate, are completely identical and look very attractive. All apartments and student rooms have panoramic windows and a loggia or balcony. It was important for architects to dispel the stereotype “social housing is a simple and inexpensive architecture” (however, the stereotype is not very relevant for modern France with its amazingly high level of quality of such objects).
The building is 12 meters wide, all apartments face on both sides, which provides them with sunlight and through ventilation. So that people living under the same roof with different lifestyles do not interfere with each other, the house has no corridors: each pair of apartments has its own elevator and staircase. Inside the dwellings, all the walls are not load-bearing, so the owners can change the layout to their liking (which some have already done). To make them last longer without renovation, the architects used materials that are resistant to the passage of time: glass, anodized aluminum, concrete, hardwood floors.
