Alain and Fon, his Thai partner, decided to build differently. In 2015, Alain outlined what would become the “Baan Din Doi” project by renting a 7,000 m² orchard. He built two small earthen houses using various techniques and materials, and spent a few years reading books and online resources to gain a deeper understanding of natural construction.
With his experience, he puts his knowledge into practice using recovered or natural materials, such as earth or bamboo. This challenge is proof that an alternative solution to “concrete/metal” is possible. Indeed, this constructive method is accessible to everyone, it is inexpensive with nearby or second hand materials.
The only downside is the time required for earthen construction. This is a long process that I had the chance to follow during a week where I was able to put my hand in the earth to build a wall of the future guest house.
At Jacques Lescop Architect, Jacques asked me to commission one of his loyal clients, La Rance. It is envisaged the programming of two duplex T3 housing of about 65 m² with a garage of about 20 m² per housing on a plot of the subdivision of Les Terrasses in Erquy. The land in the heights of the town enjoys a beautiful view of the sea, facing North.
The design of the proposed housing is based on the construction of a base built on the ground floor on which two volumes with traditional architectural script are installed (two symmetrical slate panels). This base comes to draw an entrance courtyard common to both dwellings. An easement gives access to the two dwellings, unified under the same headband with an additional common space. The two houses are composed in the same way, oriented differently: one North-West and the other South-East, in order to preserve the privacy of each. Upstairs, two bedrooms cohabit with a bathroom.
Latest project with our collective - thirteen friends of the ensa Nantes brought together to design any type of space as far as possible - we leave to Clamecy, in Nièvre, to carry out the first stage of a project at the request of four associate artists.
Indeed, they jointly bought an old hotel/restaurant in a twelfth century chapel with a large courtyard, a barn and an old quarry - the current garden. A suspended forest overlooks the roofs of Clamecy. In this magical place, our first action focuses on the raising of the barn in order to arrange the two future studios: one for metal and wood, then the second for ceramics.
The instruction being to design a modular space to be shared if necessary and of course bright and practical, despite the current configuration, we imagine a large canopy along the paved path leading to the quarry garden by promoting the reuse of certain materials on the site, such as wood flooring or windows.
Located in the Saint-Jacques district, west of the historic heart of Perpignan, the project is part of a social approach where there is a community spirit despite a great precariousness. Each rests on the other, like the Catalan houses. This district, surrounded by its historical heritage and its narrow residential fabric, the Gypsy and Maghreb community share the space of the street. Indeed, their house too narrow, dark and unhealthy, everyone appropriates the street in his own way as a real extension of housing.
Inspired by this way of living, the whole is thought along a central space, eight meters wide, in which everyone can relax, eat, discuss or meet his neighbors... The pooling of spaces, offering a certain spatial economy, also allows a social extension to each individual.
Pooling inhabited spaces means putting housing away from the street using several devices, mobile or not, in order to preserve the privacy of everyone.
In 2019, we carried out a study project (page 41) in Square Vertais, on the island of Nantes, in which we imagine a canteen suspended from a railway bridge, above rubble spilled by the city for political reasons. We recover these rubble - traces of a painful past - to build part of the canteen.
This project took shape three years later, on the occasion of the second edition of “new places to reinvent”, launched by the city of Nantes. Incredible coincidence, we candidatons to the call to project by associating with some inhabitants of the neighborhood, having various complementary profiles, to exchange and reflect together on the requalification of the place. Above all, we keep in mind the idea of recovering the rubble already present to build with. In addition to a considerable building economy, our first participative workshops in rubble, where we experience different forms of sitting with the happy volunteers, bode well for the continuation of the square Vertais.
Project plan
Sketch volumes
Surface finish
Back at Mellinet barrack, we collectively question the place of the wall in the city and the boundaries we create as future space designers. Each wall has a direct or indirect impact on our behavior, because it is it that delimits our living space. At the northwest corner of the new ZAC, a dead end faces the original enclosure of the barrack that the former inhabitants absolutely want to preserve in order to preserve their tranquility. Naturally, a wall allows to protect itself and sees itself existential for some. After some meetings on the spot, we quickly realize that this wall is so “precious” to intervene brutally on.
The idea is then to make it a common support to inhabit the bottom of these two dead ends, face to face, and try to provoke a sensory dialogue on both sides of the separation. Using a hanging system on the convent, several activities are set up according to the inhabitants like a barbecue or a trumpet. How about we talk to the wall.
Neighbours Day
At ABP Architectes, Bertrand Pourrier, co-founder of the agency, asked me to apply for a building permit to build a detached house in the town of La Rochelle, in the Tasdon district. The 779 m² plot is at the bottom of a dead end in the heart of a residential block. In the North, the right-of-way leads to the street. The plot is bordered by planted gardens and is partly terraced by two detached houses.
The project draws a Latin cross in plan where the night spaces fit laterally to the central axis of life: a large kitchen/living room, crossing East-West, between the garden and the terrace/pool.
The new construction is made with a concrete structure and is partly covered with a white corrugated aluminum sheet on a height of 2.50 m. The continuous horizontal headband, 50 cm thick and masonry in white plaster, acts as the attic for the double-sloped lateral to central volumes. The cover is made of flat terracotta tiles.
In the Sarthe, on the road to the vineyards, a small house by the road. On the high plateaus of the Hautes Touches, it dominates the valley against the bottom to the south and turns its back to the vineyards. On the menu of the materials: of everything, several accompaniments in the plate following the various works in time. A beautiful archaeological work between the original fieldstone walls, partially covered with a cement or lime coating, and a thousand-sheet of bricks, cinder blocks and plaster inside. The floor is in earth and the chestnut frame. In the corners and jambs, in poor health, the tufa stone disappears.
It is time to intervene to safeguard this charming house. Three new openings will make it possible to live healthily in the natural light of the highlands, including the kitchen that will be in front of the vineyards in the North. She will be freed from the old coatings to find the bare stone, she will be re-dressed in tufa stone outside, she will be faithful to herself again.
Here as elsewhere - 2021
Funny idea: build a tiny house taking the aesthetic and mechanical principles of an object we all know: the toolbox. This project has prompted us to carry out a great deal of research to understand what characterizes the tiny house, the regulations in force for the design and use of the latter.
We understood several issues: the respect of road models (dimensions, weight, shape), the ecological ambitions of this new type of habitat, the autonomy induced by this new way of life, but also and especially the desire to offer a comfortable living space despite its small size.
What we were particularly interested in was its opening and closing system allowing to increase the living space considerably, while remaining in an optimal gauge to move it on any road. We were convinced that this tiny had to become an invitation to travel and dream, wherever it was installed.
At Estruturama Arquitetura e Engenharia, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Grilli, alias Malu, the founder of the agency, is in charge of a major project for her: to rehabilitate a large detached house of eclectic style, current in Brazil, dating from the 90’. Malu wants to keep the foundations and typology in L of the house with the pool, and reform everything else. In addition, it offers an extension on the first floor to accommodate a small lounge and a meeting room overhanging the pool.
Not appreciating his neighbour, the client Mr. Jadilson wants to protect himself visually from him. Malu then offers two options: one with corten steel frames where planted bins are incorporated into their base and the other, a large corten steel plate accompanied by a mirrored tray in its entire length. I therefore realize a perspective from the same point of view for each in order to choose the appropriate option. On October 23, 2020, I met Mr. Jadilson with Malu to present the entire project that he approves.
In the western area of São Paulo in Brazil, this study project is intended to be an office building, with a minimum of 2,000 m², with a choice of “mixed use” on a plot of approximately 1,500 m².
Along the avenue, a wooded park protects the building from intense traffic Paulist where the ground floor is a free space, totally transparent, to accommodate neighborhood associations or temporary exhibitions as well as a canteen. Above it, an auditorium joins the five stacked desks. This cantilevered volume soars vertically into the grey Paulist sky. Indeed, today, São Paulo is an overpopulated megalopolis with more than twenty million inhabitants and therefore relies on “urban verticalisation” to fight against anarchic sprawl in the periphery. Like the Paulist SESC which are the cocktail of various commercial, cultural and social activities, the building crowns itself thirty meters high of a public square, accessible without any distinction, to admire this “urban jungle”.
Avenida , tráfego intenso
Colina vizinha
Altura inferior a 30 metros
Luz do norte
Vista para o futuro parque Alinhamento com o edifício vizinho
Futuro parque
First intentions
Futuro Parque
Estacionamento Subterrâneo
Project master plan
Bairro Residencial
Rua, tráfego baixo
View from the avenue
Adrift in the city of Rio de Janeiro with a friend, we come face to face with this mural by the Brazilian artist, Panmela Castro, along the Olímpico Boulevard. It is then an abandoned land in the former port area of Rio. Today, under renovation, it houses new cultural facilities such as the Rio Museum of Art (Bernardes Arquitetura, 2013) or the Museum of Tomorrow (Santiago Calatrava, 2015) as well as office buildings. This area, which has been in the making for some years now, continues on this momentum with various industrial rehabilitation projects.
The idea of making a bar open while keeping the exterior of the place comes directly to mind. A first sketch is drawn with three islands connected by bridges between two patios to let in the natural light until the ground floor and ventilate naturally the whole, partially closed and sheltered. Between inside and outside, the metal structure is fixed directly to the existing walls on a span of ten meters.
This concrete project consists in rehabilitating an old garage located in Cherrueix - in the middle of the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel - between the church square and the beach of the sailing tank, rue de la Cale. The building, six meters wide and twenty meters long, is divided into two spaces: a private that keeps the owner with his garage on the ground floor and a gym as well as an office upstairs, then on the other side of the separation, a cottage with a common living room with three bedrooms upstairs. A garden with a terrace extends this shared living space outside.
Indeed, we open only in the concrete block walls in the East and North in order to best respect the urban context of the street. Skylights are installed on the slate roof to bring maximum natural light to the bedrooms and gym. A wall opening is also created in the North to illuminate the office. The floor of the owner, currently under construction, we continue to think to get a real comfortable and bright gite.
At DLW Architects, I was asked to work on the project of the Food Hall on the island of Nantes, close to the school of architecture. This project is a special order from the Chessé group to create a restaurant with different flavours of the world with ten corners on the outskirts of the former Alstom hall. This project, complex by the history of the place, is a real rehabilitation preserving the original metal structure. The skin of the building is lightened to allow a maximum of natural light to penetrate through the peripheral mezzanine which houses the corners below.
My mission is to detail certain points of the project in order to consult the implementing companies afterwards. These are the technical and storage spaces, the bar, counters and guardrails of the mezzanine, obviously taking into account the entire project. Indeed, the goal is to accommodate the maximum number of people, that is 300 seats, by optimizing each layout like the shelves in railings.
For a few months, men set up their tent under the “roof” formed by the railway bridge in the Square Vertais. But in October 2017, the police carried out an express evacuation and closed the park. When it reopened, the underside of the Square Vertais bridge was covered with rubble, sometimes more than a metre thick. This rocky mass draws “a barrier” in the square and recalls the trauma of expulsion. The underside of the bridge is an atypical space composed of a massive roof, but without soil.
Above the rubble, we deploy a thin grating platform suspended from the bridge deck. Three rooms made of glazing connect vertically the underside of the concrete deck to the metal grating that lets glimpse the rubble. Like an archaeological site, we can observe the traces of an act that symbolizes today’s “welcome”. From a place of exclusion, we choose to make it a place of welcome, of formation and of meetings for those who are not given a place in the city.
A painful past
Détail de fixation des tirants au tablier du pont
Détail de fixation des tirants à la plateforme Détail d’isolation de la salle d’hiver
Above the rubble, under the train
Coupe transversale d’une salle de la cantine
des gravats
In Saffré, a town north of Nantes, a house with one floor inhabits this empty plot of about 1,750 m² in the middle of the Saffré fields. Through the existing building, we transform the ground floor into a work and storage space to accommodate workshops for wood, metal and finishing.
We also transform the attic into a two-bedroom family home. In addition, we create a place of sale and exhibition for the creation of artisanal furniture. The staggered roofs create a covered, open space that joins the three “glass blocks”: the point of sale, the last creation and previous creations.
During the sunny seasons, outdoor spaces under the roof also become an exhibition space for summer furniture. The deck appears to float above the three blocks, which are themselves slightly raised from the ground. A three-metre wooden passageway runs between these blocks and becomes a seating area.
Axonométrie éclatée projet
At the edge of the Loire, the project is a little architectural madness with a free program, mixed or not. Here, the focus of the project is to offer the possibility of escaping above the Loire for a moment.
This micro-architecture, starting from the top of the banks of the Loire, curves at the level of the path along the water to let walkers pass by by bike or on foot. A library appears at the end of the rough concrete ensemble to almost forget its materiality and reveal only its silhouette in the landscape. Three meters wide and thirty meters long, the installation flows over the Loire, like a diving board, offering a new panorama on this somewhat forgotten river. This springboard fits through the already present vegetation and takes advantage of this existing opening. There are thus two possible accesses: one directly from the road and the sidewalk, in height, and the second from the edge of the Loire, below, where the whole is joined by the platform that seems to float above the banks of the Loire.
In Nantes, northeast of Mellinet barrack, the program must accommodate a collective housing project - from T1 to T4 duplex - and additional spaces related to the needs of the neighbourhood.
First, the intervention consists of rehabilitating four existing buildings to accommodate the utility space of the project, the largest of which houses six dwellings and a refectory for office staff and open spaces on the ground floor of the two new “manned blades”.
They slide between existing buildings in the middle of a wooded area. The white concrete structure is the finest possible to achieve the desired transparency, like the Lafayette Park residential complex in Detroit, Mies van der Rohe. A “wet core” and an interior arrangement of venetian blinds preserve privacy and regulate the ambient temperature of each dwelling. The contrast between the massivity of old stones and the lightness of current materials characterizes this project.
Basra, the second largest city in Iraq after the capital Baghdad, is experiencing a real lack of drinking water for its inhabitants, a consequence of an unstable political situation and water pollution linked to oil activity. On the Chatt-el-Arab, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, an almost virgin island in the centre of the city, Sinbad Island, is the chosen site.
The challenge is then to find an effective way to recover drinking water for the local population by proposing a coherent set on the entire island, 13 ha. The idea is a cloud - “sahala” in Arabic - of white nets that seem to float at theabove the island to create public spaces in the shade of the sun such as parks or squares, like the food market where produce is sold at the low points of the metallic megastructure of the “white cloud”. Artificial streams allow the water recovered by the nets to be retained - linked to the condensation of the air at the dew point - in order to grow some local plants using aquaponics.
Since my childhood, I like to build with materials already present on the site concerned, like wood or earth. Unconsciously, this first cabin on two levels, in the forest of Barbâtre in Noirmoutier, was a real experience that still guides me today. I’ve always needed to keep in touch with what touches, what feels. Some evidence emerges from these primary constructions, both in form and materiality.
The architectural common sense, directly linked to the spirit of the place, in which the architecture “of commodities” is rejected, produced at the chain, as generic spaces without any particular soul. Having already worked on this type of projects, architecture dies in the standardization of the forms and materials used, because it is completely detached from its context. It is then thought of as an object placed on a board game. On the contrary, this hut would not exist without the trees that structure it. It is unique, in accordance with its environment.
Photography
http://archi-motion.ovh/
Brasilia, Brazil - 2020
