The project is located next to the main vehicular access to the complex and serves as both a vehicle garage and a residence for the estate’s caretaker. The terrain’s topography allows for a building with two facades, one on each of its floors; on the ground floor, there is a garage behind large gates that fully open to the access road, and on the first floor, a residence completely open to the opposite side, seeking views of the vineyards and a south-facing orientation. There is no internal communication between the two levels, which function as two separate elements protected under a single roof.

The existing building was constructed against a neighboring structure that is no longer part of the estate, and the new project disconnects from it by creating a pedestrian access between the two volumes, establishing itself as an independent piece within the constellation of architectures that populate the estate.

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The house itself is divided into two concentric parts – the inner and the outer. The inner part is comprised of basic dwelling components and laid out on a Palladian 3×3 grid with a vertically accented dining room in its centre. The outer part consists of the additional programme – patios of different size and proportion, garage, pool and storages. It forms an in–between space, neither a house, nor a garden. It serves as a mediator between both of them.

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Plot A
This is by far the largest plot with a length of 170m facing a main road and a
roundabout. A car can drive in a continuous movement around the entire plot from the ground floor to the rooftop. To drive down from the top, the car makes another tour around the entire building on the opposite side. The spaces change from one side to the other since half of the building almost adjoins the green corner building by Anne Holtrop.

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The aim of this project was to invert the buildings original function both in terms of the interior space and its relation with the exterior yet without changing the volume, in order to preserve the rows uniformity. The main façade looks onto a narrow street with an even narrower pavement, with traffic going by. This façade is now reformulated as the rear one, in an attempt to open up the building onto the estate instead, both visually and with regards to its function. The upper floor has four large window bays, two of which also reach down to the ground floor, forming two patios. This means that the bedrooms can be moved downstairs, along with the wet rooms; thus, the main upper floor, which is now completely freed up, becomes a large shared space with a connection to the estate. In turn, it is presided over by a staircase crowned by the kitchen that articulates the space.

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It is a shared facility, encouraging the encounter of various populations living close to one another, but rarely meeting. The Restaurant, cafeteria and sports activities are made accessible to students, company employees, teachers, and researchers. It aims at creating a meeting point for everyone by mixing activities that are usually separate.

The building has been conceived as a minimal structure, using rough materials, robust and long lasting techniques. Technology is used minimally to provide a place that will last in time, without need for complicated maintenance.

In response to the low construction budget, detailing has been kept to a minimum. This economical approach has allowed for the inclusion of a generous public square in the construction price, ensuring a planted pedestrian connection with the existing academic buildings next to the site. The vertical configuration of the building provides a minimal footprint.

The main materials used in the building are glass and concrete. The glass façades are characterized by large aluminium sliding doors with triple rails. The concrete beams have been prefabricated and casted in industrial moulds, while concrete columns have been casted on site.

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As part of a future ZAC linked to the Ecole Polytechnique, and more broadly in the next Paris – Saclay cluster, this student residence project optimizes both its urban location and its construction principles.
It takes advantage of the rationality of campus-type urban planning by proposing a compact building, whose obvious strength of lines already provides a firm foundation. The volumetry of the building is based on the rectangular footprint of the land and assumes its U-shape, which encloses the interior of the block. This interior, treated as an open-air garden, is the real lung of the project. The building can also be seen from this interior.
Rather than a building, the project should even be presented as a thrifty and equipped structure. The program brings together several distinct elements (student housing, communal living facilities, shops, public and private parking lots) but absolutely refuses to play the composite agglomeration card. On the contrary, it is rather the uniqueness of the lines and the modular rhythm of the whole that is striking. The distribution of the different programs obeys a logic of superimposition: a double-height first floor hosting the shops and the collective spaces of the student residence; two levels, ground floor+1 and ground floor+2, on a large open plateau for public parking spaces; on levels ground floor+3, ground floor+4 and ground floor+5, three levels of housing; and finally an attic level hosting the high levels of certain duplex housing units. This distribution has the advantage of offering the noblest and most unobstructed views to all the housing units, while designing a more streamlined building base. This base even plays on certain contrasting and superimposing effects: a largely transparent first floor and two parking levels above, which are much opaquer. Access to the parking lots provides another visual contrast, since it is provided by large, interlaced ramps, while being included in the volume of the building, give it another spectacular dimension.

Thought out on the scale of the car as well as that of the individual, the building seeks a path between a strictly functionalist approach and that constrained by domestic norms. Domesticity is however very present in the scansion of the roof vaults. The attic even appears as a rereading of the typology of strip houses, laid out on the terrace. The regularity of the architectural vocabulary, even its monumentality, does not, however, stem from formal a priori, but rather asserts itself as a strict and sober resolution of the complex requirements of the program. The sharpness of these structural responses also allows the building to express a plasticity, almost brutalist, where the materials (concrete structure, glass panels removable from the dwellings) are returned to a constructive necessity and a plastic expressiveness as pure as each other.

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