The Square Mayima massif appeared in Mure, a suburb of Toulouse, in the 1960s: nowadays, its planning scheme with four long buildings, fencing off the inner space with an increasingly less popular shopping center, is outdated. The area also needed reconstruction for socio-economic reasons. On the initiative of the city in 2011, the developer Promologis invited the ppa architectures bureau and the landscape studio Emma Blanc Paysage to develop a renovation project, in which all former residents received apartments in new buildings. During the first phase of the project, three buildings (173 apartments) and a shopping center were replaced by six residential buildings (148 apartments) with public ground floors. At the same time, the only surviving building was reconstructed (40 apartments in common ownership), its lower tier was occupied by shops, in front of it an area was arranged for a weekend fair, meetings and holidays. In general, the layout has changed to permeable, with a variety of landscaping.
The houses of the first stage were commissioned in 2014, and last year two social housing buildings by the same authors appeared on the site to the north: 24 socially rented apartments and 20 socially owned (budget - 3.75 million euros). Their size is two, three or four bedrooms.
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zooming 1/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
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zooming 2/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
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zooming 3/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
The goal of both phases of the project was a key one for the renovation of post-war housing in France: the "residenceization" of new and renewed areas, that is, increasing their convenience and attractiveness for residents in all aspects. New walking and cycling routes linked the Mayim Square to the center of Mure, the garage was hidden underground, and ground parking spaces were placed around the perimeter of the block. There are no apartments on the first floors, the lobbies serve as an intermediate space between the courtyard and the home, a meeting point for neighbors. The traffic flows were directed along the borders of the district.
From the 1960s until the beginning of the renovation, the fertile soil here was essentially destroyed, all open spaces were asphalted. The specialists of the Emma Blanc Paysage bureau have carefully restored the soil profile to a depth of one meter, using, among other things, crushed concrete from the demolished hulls. He also went to the paving of paths, and concrete panels of the dismantled shopping center were used for the courtyards of the first stage. Various types of trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, etc. were selected for landscaping.
Two buildings of the second stage were “inserted” into the nursery created on their site at the initiative of Emma Blanc Paysage during the first phase of the project: more than 5,000 trees planted there were used for landscaping the renovated Mayima Square and other projects of the Promologis developer.
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zooming 1/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
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zooming 2/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
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zooming 3/3 "Mayima Square" residential area - renovation of the northern part Photo © Philippe Ruault
The botanical theme continues with the landscaping of the balconies, also designed by Emma Blanc Paysage. The balconies themselves are proposed by ppa architectures as an extension of the kitchen and the common room, doubling their area and making the apartment look like a villa: it is a large private open-air space that softens the border between interior and environment. The architects imagine the scheme of the house as half-open matchboxes stacked on top of each other - or drawers pulled out of the chest of drawers.
