26 - Orgues de Flandre

26 - Orgues de Flandre - Martin Shulz van Treeck - 1980

69-95 Av. de Flandre, Paris

Martin Schulz van Treeck (Berlin, 1928-1999) is a German architect. More interested in the form of space than in the architectural object, he used a tool for visualizing projected buildings, created by himself, called relatoscope. When he was chosen to design the social housing complex, he decided to build a project in opposition to the monotonous character of the dwellings of the 1950s

On a surface of about 6 hectares, four brutalist towers rise towards the sky at heights of 82m, 96m, 104, and 123m respectively: they exalt verticality and are the result of a sculptural work on form. These towers all have names that evoke the musicality of this architecture. One of them is still the highest residential tower in Paris. The two linear buildings located along the Avenue de Flandre are even more radical. The specificity of these dwellings is that they are designed as outward or inward steps: the corbelled facades thus “protect” the pedestrian and bring an intimist side to the whole. In the middle of the towers, a one hectare green space isolates the children from the street. Developing in space like an origami, the two entrance buildings with imposing and symmetrical profiles seem to defy perspective. Between the two entrance buildings sits a stone portal, remnant of the workers’ complex that was there before. On the scale of a passer-by, the staircase architecture of Organs V & VI on the garden side provides space and a form of breathing, unlike the purely vertical architecture of the towers.

With the Organs of Flanders, Martin Schulz Van Treeck decided to break with the banality of the buildings of his time and, despite the gigantic size of the project, he sought to integrate a human approach into the design of the circulation and living spaces. He created an origami-like architecture, and was able to realize his dream of designing an architecture that could be perceived from a human point of view.