LAN architects, who won a competition for a correctional facility in 2013, tackled a well-known problem: prisons are carefully separated from their surroundings by blank walls, turning into a gloomy island in the middle of normal city life. This is primarily a political and social problem, the authors admit, but architecture covers all other disciplines and therefore is capable of "blurring this feeling of heterotopy between the city and the section of the correctional institution."
The semi-free zone, designed to relieve Nanterre's main prison (which holds almost twice as many people as intended), is an intermediate stage between prison and freedom. Prisoners with electronic bracelets can leave the facility during the day to go to work. The building has 89 cells for a total of 92 people. The "semi-prison" occupies the inner, courtyard-facing part of the building, while the reintegration service faces the city. Its full name is the Haut-de-Seine Correctional Reintegration and Probation Service.
The building is inscribed in the corner of two streets and from there it looks like an ordinary parallelepiped. Single-family houses, residential areas of the 1960s and an industrial zone are located around. The building faces them with facades made of corten steel perforated panels. This elegant material, with a play between permeability and opacity, is complemented by an impressive gesture: a large rectangular opening revealing the courtyard with its white palette (aluminum sheets and stucco). Such measures should, according to the authors of the project, turn the prison wall into a facade, soften the transition between external and internal space, and also reconcile different scales.
The ground floor houses the lobby, dating boxes, dining room, gym, media library and laundry room. The cameras overlook only the courtyard, but there is not a single pair of “windows to windows”. The courtyard itself is lined with basketball and handball courts in pastel colors. There are green "ditches" for collecting rainwater, planted with grains and aquatic plants, as well as a vegetable garden where the prisoners themselves plant vegetables for themselves.
