27 - Student & social housing

27 - Student & social housing - Lacaton & Vassal - 2014

28 BIS Rue de Thionville, Paris

The building was commissioned to Lacaton&Vassal, an office known for the social housing and sustainable architecture. The residence is located in an area that is developing quickly, between l’Ourcq canal and old railroad tracks. To address this changing context and favor urban fusion, the project proposes a program in seven floors that includes 98 housing units for students and thirty social dwellings, a shelter and three retail spaces.

The project provides spacious apartments and gives, as much as possible, the opportunity to the inhabitants to enjoy the 2 situations: on the garden and on the street. All apartments are run-through or double-oriented. The living rooms and kitchens are on the garden side and open onto a 2,10m deep winter garden, south or south-east orientated, from 9 to 28 sqm, extending in a 1m deep balcony. The bedrooms and main bathrooms, well glazed, are on the north façade and open onto a continuous balcony. The winter gardens and balconies give each dwelling a private outdoor space that offers the possibility to live outside in a collective context while being home. Combined with thermic and shadow curtains, they ensure a function in the winter and summer indoor climatic conditions (thermal comfort) and savings on energies, within a bioclimatic approach. Essential to the life quality in an urban context, these private outdoor spaces make the apartment conditions closer to the facilities and pleasure you can have in an individual house.

The building is interesting in that it bears witness to a militant strategy that Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been implementing for over twenty years. It consists of asserting that, whatever the program, it is possible to build at a lower cost in order to give users as much appropriable space as possible. A position that has been able to rely on the wave of sustainability to develop and mature. The additional spaces are often considered as thermal buffers to regulate the exchanges with the outside.