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Tectône +tactarchitectes

Housing operation consisting of 40 rent-based social residences and 60 affordable ownership residences, 15 of which are designed through participative process. + Commercial spaces

This project is one of the first undertakings being developed on the southern portion of the Ile de Nantes Prairie-au-Duc district.

The operation is grounded on the dialogue and active listening of the various contributors of the project : its fundamental goal aims at fostering a cooperative framework for each of the active players taking part in the participative housing procedure. The latter is being managed with the help of Wigwam’s — a consulting firm that specializes in assisting multiple types of construction clients — “Integrated Design” method.

The basis for this method is to gather the entirety of the people involved in the act of building during concertation workshops. Six of them have been coordinated up to now, all of which have brought together the developer and urbanist of the “Concerted Planning Area”, the clients (SNI/GHT/Les Ruches), the architects along with the many engineering offices, and last but not least, the technical controller.

Those workshops have been seminal in the conception process. They have been orchestrated from June to November 2015, and aided the completion of the draft, schematic and detailed design phases. The subjects of the full-day work sessions were about the overall organization inside the lot (shared inner and outer locations, materiality, thresholds, pathways…), and sometimes more specifically about the Ruches residences and their distinct mutual spaces (festivity room, guest accommodations, collective terraces and cultivating gardens, craft and tinker space, laundry facility).

The project fulfills the volumetric and overall templates preconized by the urbanist team SMETS/UAPS. It revels in the idea of a compact and qualitative city, delivering plenty of valuable exterior space — not just in the heart of the built area though but on the buildings too. Access is granted to two terraces present on the fifth floor : one of them opening on the future Metropolitan Park, and the other on the Prairie-au-Duc boulevard, the Aimé Césaire primary school, and the Parc des Chantiers.

A certain strictness permeates the operation, but one that liberates precious outside continuations for every apartment, large-sized windows, generous high ceilings, and finally a strong, durable materiality through the use of concrete bricks and lacquered aluminum frames. Furthermore our project fights for the possibility to have worthy ground floor homes in an urban environment ; the increased height requested by the construction documents handed out by SMETS / UAPS were critical in this enterprise. It lets in a considerable amount of light, and a capacity to add future mezzanine floors if need be — increasing the living surface along the way.