At the edge of Paris’s 20th arrondissement, trapped between the périphérique and the HBM belt, the Python-Duvernois district epitomizes one of the city’s most precarious urban conditions. Against the tabula rasa logic of radical urban renewal, a civic and architectural mobilization succeeded in preserving three stone towers dating from the 1950s.
I argue that the systemic crisis, financial, spatial, and energetic, must not invalidate the popular ideal of the detached house. Every citizen, regardless of economic means, deserves access to the poetics of dwelling: a relation to the sky, beautiful daylight, and spaces marked by time, conceived for loving, living, and growing.
To reconcile the serial abstraction of collective housing with the singularity of the suburban pavilion, the project challenges the contemporary imperative of building “fast and cheap.” This “Immeuble-pavillonnaire” reclaims attention to details, weaving a typological continuity between the Parisian urban fabric and the suburban imaginary.
Inspired by my thesis Le Mythe de la Façade, the project recasts the existing building thought the use of “Habillages.” As a lightweight economical multilayered garments, they envelop the building’s skeleton in a continuous skin extending from interior to exterior. The intervention provides thermal insulation, intimacy, and an expressive, almost ornamental capacity. Technically, these layered assemblies borrow from Couture and interior design, opening an alternative architectural trajectory.
(Made on my 2015 13'' Macbook Air)