Less

The operation includes a gymnasium, sold off plan to the city of Paris, where 69 units of social housing are located. This intervention seeks first to achieve a hybridization of the grand industrial scale found in the area with the private scale of the housing unit.

  Access to each housing unit is an individual promenade that starts in the main hall, open to the semi-private garden, according to a layout inspired by the ones often found in Parisian apartment buildings dating from the 1960s and 70s – the golden age for such constructions. Each housing unit is appointed with an individual loggia, whose variable depth is calculated to allow occupants their legitimate degree of privacy. On the ground floor, metal mesh filters the light to avoid disturbing the practice of sports, reduced to the exposure of sports practitioners and dancers to the view of passersby.

The many loggias, passageways, footbridges, stairs, and garden buffer areas take privacy into account yet increase the occasions for transparency and visual porosity throughout, taking the risk of going against a contemporary desire for new buildings to totally isolate occupants from the each other’s view. The people living in the terrace houses become a kind of show, unfolding as the occupant strolls along his path.

Less, Paris
Program: housing
Architect: AAVP Architecture
Design team: Vincent Parreira, Marie Brodin, Nicolas Fontaine-Descambres, Lara Ferrer
Structural engineering: EVP
Installation: Louis Choulet
Landscape: Atelier Roberta
Completion: 2016