Halfway between the architectural type of open block and detached family home, the residential complex designed LAN Architecture can accommodate a wide variety of apartments intended for different potential residents. These new occupants will generate new urban dynamics in the city. This heterogeneity of spaces is achieved through a construction system based on a few constructive elements allow flexibility: concrete frames and wooden surround.
This flexibility has been the key factor in the development of the project, as appears from the very organization of the apartments to the possible configurations facade, making it possible gradar levels inside intimacy.
Description of the project by LAN Architecture
Creating a convivial setting that federates the town’s different districts and acts as a kind of bridge between the apartment block typology and the small private house, was one of the major keys to this project’s success. Ideally, we had to be able to respond to universal housing needs, and propose different types of units in order to favour and create mixity and generational confrontation.
From the plan to the facade, our proposition is a superimposition of different typologies, diverse in the size of the spaces, the relationship between the apartment and its exterior and the way in which each room is lived in. The volumes we arrived at are very flexible.
This diversity reflects our modern, democratic society, but also represents an interesting commercial posture in that stimulates curiosity between neighbours and therefore avoids depersonalisation.
In construction terms, the words diversity, variety and morphology are often equated with increased construction costs. There is some truth in this, and when one explores this path one has to be extremely vigilant.
We put all our experience in housing into this proposition, initially seeking a construction system that could absorb the project’s concept. This led us to the choice of concrete, the rationalised superimposition of loggias, and the choice of a single material: wood.
The task wasn’t simple but we tried to respond through the notion of loss of scale. An apartment building is often characterised by its windows, the rhythm of its façade and the notion of domesticity extremely present in its language.
We based our proposition on a very simple idea: creating a dual language with the use of a double skin. Residents can use the sliding panels to modulate light, shade and heat. By adjusting this second, sliding skin, one can create intimacy or on the contrary, open completely, or combinations of both.
Photography.- Julien Lanoo
