64 Social Housing / Guinée et Potin Architects

Architects: Guinée et Potin Architects
Location: 17440 Aytré, France
Lead Architect: Hervé Potin
Area: 3820.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Sergio Grazia

Collaborator: Alterlab

From the architect. This 64 dwellings project, divided into two buildings, is implemented in the heart of the residence Pierre Loti, completing an urban renewal. The master plan places the project at a crossroads of varied building types and densities. As a consequence, the process aims for a volumetric transition, possible within the context, contributing to the future identity of the new Pierre Loti Street.

Considering the multiple features (size, parking area, orientation, relation to the nearby buildings, surrounding areas layouts…) of the two set up areas offered for each building and the ambitious goal regarding density, a differentiated answer is given for each building in order to make the most of their respective potentials:

– On one hand, the R building, through the shape of its roof, floors’ movements (R+4 on the Charles de Gaulle Avenue, R+5 in the center, and R+3 on Pierre Loti street) and volumes’ gradual transition, assures a new link toward Aytré city center.
– On its part, the S building facing the most imposing form of the Galapagos building offers in response a more compacted monolithic volume.

The two constructions offer to the passerby sequenced facades: horizontally with long terraces and vertically with entrances and vertical flows inside the buildings, designed as «rifts». The project highlights ideas of appropriation and habitability, with a wish of giving to each dwelling a nearly private access. The treatment of the side spaces in connection to the Pierre Loti Street and following on from the buildings fits in with the latter outline.

Accesses to the dwellings: housing’s appropriation and privatization.
Regarding the R building, the path reinterprets features of an individual housing into the apartment block: passing through a fence, pushing a barrier, following an alley, taking advantage of the landscape and entering the dwelling through a door directly open to the outside.

Outdoor corridors allow an aerial walk, offer numerous views and support neighborly relations. Besides, they enable the dwellings to be dual-aspect, to benefit from double or triple orientation, and preserve privacy. They lead to only 6 dwellings per floor.

These «pontoons» establish a gradual distance between public and private spaces. In addition, displaced accesses to the entrances preserve the dwellings’ intimacy from the traffic. The outdoor corridors give access to the dwellings thanks to private footbridges.

Concerning the S building, the density of the construction and the efficiency of the distribution (8 dwellings per floor) implies a precise work regarding natural light input in each space, and especially in the communal areas. The path invented for the residents starts in a dual-aspect hall, north-south oriented, complete with a north-western fragment. This cutting up in the building allows the creation of clear views toward north, south, and west, in shared spaces bathed in light.