If we think about social housing in Europe, the Jean Nouvel’s Nemausus, localized in Nimes, France is a good, innovative and efficient example. It showed us that an industrialized building system can provide bigger spaces at a low building cost. The project attempted to revive the ideas of identity in opposition to the standardization of space and user. The aim was building an apartment 30% or 40% bigger than usual for the same price. Nouvel defined “a good dwelling is a large dwelling”. A good apartment is flexible, able to convert. A good cheap apartment in a democratic sense. Applied to publicly subsidized housing this meant: efficient and cost-effective building10. Maximum apartment size was provided for by placing communal spaces such as stairways and halls outside the building. Flexibility was created by dividing seventeen different modules for apartment layouts - that range in size from onebedroom flats, duplex to three bedroom triplexes - mixed into the 114 apartments contained in the two blocks. The low cost requirement was met by using prefabricated industrial elements for interior and exterior fittings (mass-produced façades, stairways and galleries) that are items of easy replication and assembly11.
Nouvel designed the apartments from the inside out to prolong the interior and provide more living space. The balconies provide outdoor living to the full: folding doors allow the balcony to be completely integrated with the main living space, expanding the boundaries of each dwelling façade to façade. He also rationalized the use of the land locating the garage floor half-buried in the building’s footprint. The total habitable area is 10.400m², so the average of each dwelling is 91m², far beyond the traditional social housing area, and it only was possible by the cheap and efficient building system and the use of prefabricated.
View of exterior11
Even they had different goals, both projects broke with the social housing pattern of low quality space with innovative planning and construction solutions, providing bigger and better social spaces and avoiding the monotony of the traditional housing complexes, allowing personalization of each dwelling against standardization.
Folding doors10
Possibility of apartment’s boundaries expansion
Section of the different apartments12
Walkways11
‘Jean Nouvel - Nemausus 1’, Architectures (Baukunst) [documentary series], Series 1 Episode 04, ARTE, 20 Aug 1998, <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gYcroTb2Jms#t=697>, accessed 15 Sep 2014.
10
Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s website, Nemausus housing project <http://www. jeannouvel.com/>, accessed 15 September 2014 11
‘Pongsatorn’s case study: ‘Domestic’ reflected by ‘Objects’ /site: ‘Nemausus’ by Jean Nouvel’, Indayear2 Studio, <http://indayear2studio-1314s1.blogspot. se/2013/09/pongsatorns-case-study-domestic_14.html>, accessed 15 Sep 2014. 12
Inside view10