Revitalize the city. Vaugirard Social Housing by Christ & Gantenbein
04/10/2023.
[PAR] France
metalocus, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ
metalocus, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ
Project description by Christ & Gantenbein
Vaugirard Social Housing, Christ & Gantenbein’s first completed project in Paris, is a large-scale residential development that redefines the perimeter of a plot in the city’s 15th arrondissement. Mixing urban complexity with the comfort of high-quality housing, it is a unique combination of infrastructure and city life, potentially becoming a new model for subsidized housing.
Urban Dimensions
This project is a manifestation of a contemporary strategy to reinvigorate the city, as it rests above a remodeled subway maintenance workshop developed in parallel with Dominique Lyon Architects. This unique situation – combining an infrastructural environment with housing – instills new life, accessibility, and a sense of community, while ensuring the urban diversity of an evolving neighborhood with a hybrid program. Serving as connective tissue in the metropolitan fabric, the project’s presence is modest and humble yet resilient and progressive. Along with the workshop below and additional projects to be developed as part of a larger master plan, it introduces a new street in Paris that traverses a previously inaccessible part of the city.
Vaugirard Social Housing by Christ & Gantenbein. Photograph by Florent Michel.
Volume + Facade
Realized together with local partner Margot-Duclot Architects, Vaugirard Housing elegantly complements the traditional residential area.
The project is inspired from in-depth research on Parisian housing typologies that Christ & Gantenbein conducted at ETH Zurich. The research team catalogued many examples of dense urban living, revealing the strategies used to create identity, and optimizing access to light and ventilation within the volumes.
The long façade is presented as a series of volumes characterized by setbacks and carved-out recessions – redents – resulting from typological rigor and richness, where limitations are acknowledged but simultaneously create a framework for invention in a sculpted volume with movement and rhythm.
Vaugirard Social Housing by Christ & Gantenbein. Photograph by Walter Mair.
The theme of overlapping functions impacts all aspects of the project, determining the position of the entrance halls, the staircases, the positioning of the apartments, and the resulting urban form with undulations that offer various views and multiple possibilities for layouts and improved natural ventilation. The reinforced concrete framework is complemented by a facade infill made with large, prefabricated wooden elements. The choice of wood follows a twofold strategy: it lightens the construction and reduces the costs of superimposed structures while improving the building’s ecological footprint.
A metal facade wraps around the exterior, and steel with a transparent varnish preserves a raw touch and references Parisian rooftops. Along with the strictly repeated window proportions of the fenêtre Parisienne, it is an update of its Haussmannian context, appropriating the city’s traditional roof cover elements, where familiar elements are reinterpreted to come together in the historical and cultural context of the city. With a length of 124 meters, the housing complex is entirely independent from the maintenance building below, using a system of spring boxes that absorb vibrations.
Vaugirard Social Housing by Christ & Gantenbein. Photograph by Walter Mair.
Interior
Inside, residents are offered 104 units on five floors via a logement à vie model. Four apartment types range from smaller-scale studios to five-room layouts, benefitting from the building’s orientation. Within the narrow framework of standard-sized, subsidized apartments, the architects offer the inverse of repetitive units by revealing spatial qualities not usually found in social housing: Articulated, mostly column-free plans in a wide spectrum of orientations feature transversal and diagonal views, and at least one balcony or loggia per apartment is paired with spacious interiors, fundamentally increasing living standards and quality of life.
The wide range of orientations and sequences of rooms in enfilade underscores the richness of the plan which allows for numerous connections via space, light and connectivity.
The loggias, which are unheated spaces that regulate the building’s temperature, are not considered in the available square footage per apartment and are thus offered as an addition to the residents.
Vaugirard Social Housing by Christ & Gantenbein. Photograph by Florent Michel.
A new model for social housing
“The Vaugirard Social Housing in Paris is an example of how urban densification can support the ecology of the city by reconnecting it with large-scale infrastructure hubs.”
Emanuel Christ.
Bringing the human scale and the scale of the neighborhood to center stage, the building advocates community in a resilient and durable way. Subsidized housing becomes a form of inclusion, marked by social and cultural sensitivity, responsibility, and sustainability in this new cohabitation model that is typologically relevant to the buildings lining the boulevards of Paris.
“This is not an iconic new piece of architecture. Quite the contrary; we strove for compactness and rationality, dignity, and generosity. We created an environmentally, socially, and communally responsible building designed to do two simple things: increase the quality of life of its tenants and repair the urban fabric in a simple, modest, yet robust and high-quality new building in Paris.”
Emanuel Christ.
Christ & Gantenbein is an architecture practice. Founded in 1998 by Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the office employs a team of over 80 architects from 20 countries.
The firm‘s most prominent completed projects include the expansion and transformation of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich and the extension of the Kunstmuseum Basel, both cultural landmarks with a global reach.
In 2020, the office completed the multifunctional Lindt Home of Chocolate, a monumental yet versatile space for Lindt & Sprüngli in Zurich. Furthermore, C&G is working on a diverse range of projects across Europe. Among them are a social housing development in Paris, a versatile office building for Roche in Germany, the extension of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, and most recently, a housing and office building in the historic center of Hamburg. Underscoring the diversity of scale and program the office operates in, the Zurich University Hospital project, which is currently in development, will transform an entire district of Switzerland‘s most populous city, giving healthcare and medical research an unrivalled new home.
Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein graduated in the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in 1998, since then they have maintained a balance between their profession and academic involvement. After lectureships inter alia at the ETH Studio Basel (2000–2005), the HGK Basel (2002–2003), the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio (2004, 2006, 2009) and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (2008), they returned to the ETH Zurich (2010–2015). They currently teach at Harvard GSD.
After internationally acclaimed projects in London, Jalisco (Mexico) and Jinhua (China), their studio Christ & Gantenbein continues to cement its reputation at home and abroad with numerous museum concepts as well as a broad range of private and public commissions. Among the designs most recently realised stand out an extension to the Kunstmuseum Basel, the renovation of and extension to the Swiss National Museum in Zurich.
In the spring of 2019, Christ & Gantenbein presented the first monographic exhibition of their most iconic buildings in Japan with “The Last Act of Design”. The same year, the studio contributed pieces to “The Poetics of Reason” at the 5th edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. In 2017 the practice was invited to contribute to the Chicago Architecture Biennale, while the previous year, it participated in the 15th Venice Biennale “Reporting from the Front”.