Pradenn Housing

Saint-Herblain, France

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EQUITONE [natura] facade material

Equitone [tectiva] facade material

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Pradenn Housing

Saint-Herblain, France

Firm

Block Architectes

Type

Residential › Multi Unit Housing

YEAR

2013

Photographs by Stéphane Chalmeau and Nicolas Pineau

The brief stands for 89 socials housings, 51 in rental and 38 in accession. The site is in an important developpement area of the Great Nantes called la Pelousière. The project tries to combine density, mixed-use and comfort for the inhabitants.
A reinvented landscape :
The project is inserted and interacting with its context. A gradation between public and private has been organized through built and landscaped sequences : access ramp, public space, parking on the public space or underneath the buildings, pedestrian path, halls, housings and loggias.
The general built shape comes from an agricultural typology, that existed in the site history, a barn at the scale of the landscape. The project searches to catch this materiality of the shed, through the use of an industrial cladding material. This simple and efficient shape also drives the fiction of a large "country house".
Then, a domestic scale is taken from the close by suburban context and integrated by the addition of wood fences and greenhouses borrowed from the garden. This sample, as a copy / paste process, reminds to the collective the sums of individuals, and shows the residential and individual dimension in a collective building that tries to escape from its usual expression.
The three buildings are "placed" on a concrete base, raised from the floor. The space in between is either open, where the parking is, or flanked by vegetated slopes in a continuity of the central plaza, integrating the buildings.
The whole project is a reinterpreted sample of the neighborhood environment, put at the scale of building.

Comfort and energetic performance :
Prior to anything else the housings have been thought from the inside, and in relation to the surrounding nature. Thus the housings have mainly double exposure, from one side to another or in an angle. Every spaces have been studied to have exterior views and daylight. The greenhouses and their balconies are present in most of the housings, providing a large outside space. The building has a structural principal of concrete walls in between the housings, crossing from one side to another. Being altogether compact and insulated from the outside, the building reaches the performance of the BBC-Effinergie label.