Îlot Saverne

Nantes, France

Can the Madeleine district be read like a novel?

A stimulus to discovery, experimentation and mixing. The drawing of an imaginary city made of collages? The city becomes a history of the city; it tells its own story, each building and each collage reminding us of the story of its original.

This approach has the advantage of linking the work of different generations, forcing us to ask ourselves what our predecessors tried to build, without accepting nostalgia as a guide to the project. The city as exquisite corpse builds a collective culture, but this is not linked to an archaic vision of the old city. It means acquiring an additional distance from the urban environment, this artefact, this heterogeneous invention that we consider to be a natural environment.

This reinvestment in the state of things through a second vision is a literary gaze in the style of a surrealist stroll, a situationist drift, a visual selection, an artistic framing. Living there is like travelling. As Colin Rowe put it, “a collage city that can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature. Collage allows us to accept utopia in fragments”.

The idea here is to defend the notion of the collage city and the concept of the architect-tinkerer. Our project affirms our desire to be part of this history and even to synthesise it.

Program
New construction of housing for first-time buyers and social housing + shops + offices

Location
îlot Saverne
ZAC de la Madeleine Champ de Mars
Nantes, France

Schedule
Compettion: 2014

Client
Giboire

Project management
Lead architect: Hamonic+Masson & Associés

Floor Area
10 500 m²