Looking out for You
Lise Clara Alessandra Courtin
/Alice Charlotte Marguerite Léa Dareys
Cendrier-Centre, Geneva, Conversion of a former office building into housing.
The project aims to be a home for an inter-abled and intergenerational community, a place for people interested in sharing moments of domestic life with others and engaging in a relationship of care with one another. It is thought for tenants who want to benefit from help in certain activities and/or company, in a dynamic quite close to the one of a nuclear family. While designing, we tried to pay a specific attention to the needs of wheelchair users, elderly people, single parents, and others who live alone. We also tried to address what such cohabitation would entail.
The seven top stories of the tower of the Cendrier Centre in the city center of Geneva are dedicated to the dwellings. They are structured around three indoor gardens, each three stories high. Each floor also has a kitchen and a living room space. We wanted to provide the inhabitants with spaces for common domestic activities as we believe that we can encourage care among them through shared activities and care for their home, while also enhancing their quality of life with new possibilities. We designed ad-hoc furniture to facilitate use, such as the gardening planter with space for the legs when using a wheelchair and different heights. The beds of the gardens are also thought as new topographies, invading the rest of the floor, and allowing for a promenade with gentle slopes. The entrance to the building was shifted towards the back courtyard, which also becomes a garden. The staircase at the rear is reworked so that stairs and elevator stand at the same level of hierarchy.
Each floor hosts the same typologies of individual cells. Common spaces rotate around them. They were thought to accommodate people with specific needs: wheelchair users, single parents and children, single people, but remain versatile. They are separated from, and connected to, the common spaces by multilayered textile walls. These walls provide flexible visual and acoustic insulation. They make possible new ways of communicating and looking out for one another. At the same time, they open new perceptions and revisitations of the domestic space. Wooden and textile, combined with Victorian sceneries of greenhouses, the materiality of the project aims to convey the gentle and warm feeling of a home, nested and thriving in the existing structure of the former office building.
This project was developed as part of Studio ELII.