Chilly-Mazarin

Chilly-Mazarin, France

It’s hard to create a living space when a site suffers from so many visual, acoustic and spatial constraints. 

A site that had been declared unsuitable for development and has suddenly become suitable with the housing crisis; a sky slashed by an air traffic lane; a background that is traversed by an RER express train line; an enclave whose landmarks are an industrial sawmill and a fish factory: that’s the context of this project.

And so you created your own landscape. We wanted to create a structured and well-protected living enclave. We were obsessed with creating a balance of 50% greenery and 50% solid.

14 staircases for 74 housing units is a lot. It’s an in-between situation. Each landing serves two flats at most and acts as a gangway between two neighbouring blocks. The planted framework gives scale and meaning to a place that didn’t use to have either. 

Lawns, bamboo and trees; the vegetation finds niches everywhere, inside and on the inward-facing sides of the building. The general approach is to spread things out and the entrances to the blocks of flats are varied, individualised and hidden by the greenery. Residents’ cars are kept out of sight within the infrastructure.

The building’s family-friendly and homely character is designed to allow families to live together in harmony in open and airy surroundings whilst still respecting everyone’s privacy.

Program
Construction of 74 apartments

Location
Chilly-Mazarin, France

Schedule
Delivery: 2015

Client
Immobilière 3F

Project management
Lead architect: Hamonic+Masson & Associés

Photographer
Sergio Grazia

Contractor
Bouygues

Cost
8,9 M€ excl. tax.

Floor Area 
5 800 m²