Social Housing in Belleville Street / Atelier du Pont

Architects: Atelier du Pont
Location: 36 Rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France
Lead Architects: Atelier du Pont Architects – Philippe Croisier & Anne-Cécile Comar (architect project manager: Luc Pinsard)
Area: 1257.0 m2
Project Year: 2018
Photographs: Takuji Shimmura

Collaborators: EVP, Delta, Axio, Plan02, FARC
Client: Elogie-Siemp

Text description provided by the architects. The project is composed of 2 buildings hosting 19 social housing units, and a shop on ground floor. The urban fabric of Belleville is composed of two intersecting systems: on the one hand narrow busy roads lined with typical “faubourg”-style apartment buildings cascading down the hill; and on the other the spaces at the centers of the city blocks, which are very narrow, often planted, and lined with vernacular buildings running perpendicular to the slope.

We wanted to restore this double-sided character on the Rue de Belleville with a design that plays the density, piling and stratification games through a contemporary design revisiting the traditional faubourg housing type.

The heart of the block is a green alley that harmonizes with the existing fabric and reveals the depth of the plot. Box-balconies stretch from the facade to offer generous outdoor spaces and wide and unobstructed views of Paris.

A new building that infiltrate the urban jungle while claiming a significant change: exit insalubrity, the density is here mastered and happy.