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La Courneuve, France

Context
The plot at 170 Rateau Street is located on the edge of town, facing an industrial zone consisting of warehouses along the highway and the railway suburban train. Although there is an alignment along the street, the built-up front appears largely discontinuous, with alternating constructions R+1 and R+4. This results in an impression of discontinuity characteristic of the suburbs. Globally sparse, the district contains a strong potential for development that foreshadows an evolution of the built front in the coming years. The project plays on this transition period, offering a full contrast with its neighbors. It reveals the emptiness that existed before and sometimes appears as an unusual and autonomous object, sometimes as the prefiguration of the future built front.

Quality of housing
The plot calls obvious intervention: the staircase is positioned in the center to offer the possibility of dual-aspect flats. The construction takes place across the entire width of the plot, living rooms open to the garden, while the night and service rooms are on the street to the north. Access to the building is through a bright hall which let’s see the garden. The staircase, lit naturally, distributes split-level apartment superimposed with the living space at access level, double-aspect, largely open and open.

Construction and materiality
The optimization of the constructive system leads to a modest architectural expression, at the service of the necessary control of the building cost.

Facade materials are chosen for their simplicity of implementation and for their durability. The simplicity and the constructive rigor are read in frontage in the form of a frame repeating the structure posts / beams. The surfaces between this frame are then filled with wooden window, flaps with wooden battens and cladding of the same nature whose variation of layout animates the facade. Added to a simple and efficient volumetry, this treatment of windows gives the whole a precious character. A natural anthracite coating comes to dress the volume and guarantees the good aging of the whole.