Living Marseille
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Full project title
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Project Description
Living Marseille is an optimistic research on the idea of "metropolitanity" through the lens of 3 margins situations in the mediterranean city. The project imagines 3 scales of actions to regenerates the dialogue between housing typologies and urban public space. From a tiny project house, to the construction of an inclusive appartment building in the center to 28 appartments in the earth of a neighborhood in decline, the concept imagines ideas to live better in all the parts of the metropolis.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
Living Marseille is prospective research about urbanity and housing.
The project proposes 3 scales of actions for a better relationship between housing and life in a metropolitan city.
The chosen location is Marseille, one of the largest coastal city of the Mediterranea. The large urban fabric of the city is composed by many tense situations in terms of public space and dwellings quite representative of the problematics that our cities face nowadays.
Housing in Marseille is a tense topic, the city is marked by dramatic events such as the collapse of insalubrious dwellings few years back, and the abandon of the north poor, multicultural districts by urban policies. Those situations brought many people to live in ‘lost areas’ of the metropolis, neighborhoods in decline in the periphery or old buildings threatening to collapse in the center of the city.
By targeting those who the places and people that need it the most in Marseille, we try to give ideas and hopeful perspectives to the challenges in France and in Europe.
3 precise situations are addressed in this proposition, trying to propose architectural projects and financial micro-systems going from the tiny scale to the bigger ones. S, M, XL.
The 3 buildings are imagined with the same constructive system creating a sense of belonging in the city, the style of a renewal of the city of Marseille and its reconciliation with all its parts.
A project house to organize the renovation of a poor neighborhood in the north, an apartment building combined to a day center to heal in the center of the old city and a complex of 28 apartments reconnecting old 70’s housing operations with the present ; are all the new faces of a ‘living Marseille’.
The 3 building are made with an audacious assemblage of stone, laminated timber and hempcrete, all local ressources of the Mediterranean Europe, experiment the possibility of a virtuous and simple system to address diverse urban housing problematics.
Key objectives for sustainability
The project is placed in a constructive tradition that is inherited from architectures such as those of Fernand Pouillon in the Old Port of Marseille or Utzon in Majorca. The 3 scales are built from the rediscovery of traditional and local constructive techniques, mixing the stone, timber, and hemp ressources behind the mediterannea. The detail remains almost rudimentary, the almost archaic stacking of stone blocks testify to a strong constructive heritage in the south of France. The massive stone facades are coupled with glued laminated wood and hempcrete in order to guarantee spans and situations specific to today's housing. Hybridizing stone with other materials and contemporary techniques makes it possible to evoke without copying, the living solutions offered are contemporary and admit the comfort sought today while preserving the incomparable aspect of the natural material.
By revitalizing the use of local ressources, the 3 constructions question the idea of living together while encouraging new sustainable standards. The constructive system of the stone is then an opportunity facing the contemporary stakes : the need of flexibility, the question of architectural identity and its preservation, the opportunities to live together and to live outside…
The building include innovative easy ecological systems to improve the life of the people living, using it. Water collectors and phyto-purification systems are installed on the roofs permitting a reasonable use of running water. The use of stone and wood is preferred here for the ease of its dry construction but also for its thermal qualities regarding the coastal climate of Marseille.
Also, the idea to put architecture in places that are abandoned by the public authorities is a political act. The three scales involve the apparition of a new local circular economy, a new desire to take care of the entire city and all the people making it grow.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
These architectures certainly use the systems of a constructive tradition but they remain furiously contemporary.
The archaic stacking of stone becomes in the project, the opportunity to enrich the formal city with innovative shapes, such as the oculus, to play with simple but joyful shapes while investing the streets with a yellow non treated Provencal stone.
The dwellings, the association house are enclosed between soft stone facades, the main rooms open towards the south and take advantage of the presence of a stone wall, it brings the inertia known to the stone, ensures the protection.
In the two housing buildings, rooms are through and ventilated, a frame of living room is attached to a night area by the interface of a wooden structure between two stone walls. the entrances are made by the south and the main spaces look south. in this reading, from across, we cut out bedrooms and dining rooms that finally read more like ‘rooms’ to be appropriated.
The demand for Type-3 apartments by investors (an apartment for a couple with a single child) inherited from a real estate heritage dating back to the thirty glorious years, is finally becoming relevant despite the tensions on the other types of housing in marseille.
For the same size, the same price then, a multitude of possibilities of evolution in time are offered: finally, a good housing is a housing that offers freedom.
The constructive system of the stone is then an opportunity in front of the contemporary stakes : the room becomes office, the office becomes roommate dorm, the dorm becomes playroom, etc, etc. The constructive aspect of this projects also allows us large rooms for people to reunite in, collective space to meet your neighbors, public spaces to imagine the future of your neighborhood, the city you grew up in.
Key objectives for inclusion
The 3 cases focus on an experimentation in the possibilities of creating new architectural methods adapted to our new living paradigms.
This first scale questions the urban forms inherited from the last century and wants to renew it. At a time when the only way out of the housing bars of the French urban periphery seems destruction, the tempietto imagines a project house as the heart of the renewal of the northern districts of Marseille. In this small kiosk, the renovation of the parc Kallisté is organized, inspired by the principles of Lacaton/Vassal on the « espace plus » and by proposing the possibility of a densification of the built-up area and of the vegetation on these large neglected urban zones in order to return them to a human scale.
The second, rue d’Aubagne is infamous for the collapse of its insalubrious buildings, 3 years ago. Today the proposal made is the possibility of a new look on the access to the property and its relationship to the public space. We imagine the possibility of mutualizing the syndicates of co-ownerships on the scale of the entire block in the form of a «free syndicate association», an existing model close to the cooperative housing. This operation would propose rejuvenated forms of the housing typologies of Marseille, the «3 windows», adding collective practices such as the pooling of the gardens of the heart of the blocks, erasing the fences of the strict land limits, opening it to the city.
In the last operation, 28 new housings, the focus is flexibility. The span between the stone facades allows for flexibility, a wooden structure partition that is totally malleable can be opened, removed, moved. We imagine this wall as the support of the home, it holds all the necessary devices for housing, kitchens, storage, all being totally appropriable. The use of stone allows flexibility within its walls, the apartment can accommodate the many lives of its inhabitants, partitioning or opening as many times as necessary.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
By imagining a constructive system for three housing scale, ‘living Marseille’, takes the pretext of architecture to experiment in larger debates of the urban fabric, flexibility, economic speculation, future of old neighborhood, access to public and private spaces…
This concept agglomerates inclusivity (equal opportunities, public participation, citizen engagement, co-design, universal design, accessibility, affordability, building-for-all theories), sustainability (new circular economy, local ressources, ecological constructive systems, bio-sourced materials) and quality of living (common spaces, innovative shapes, contemporary building and plans).
In this project, the architectural representation reunite all the three notions of the new European Bauhaus, by proposing ideas in all the aspects of the architecture projects : financement of the project, new organisation of the access to property, new collaborative ways of drawing architecture, innovative constructive systems to propose imaginative new ways of living together.
The example of Marseille was taken to showcase the main challenges that we as architects, urbanists, politicians, inhabitants, we will face in the near future of our city.
The idea of the research living Marseille is to experiment new ways of producing architecture and urban projects in an even more global dimension. The initiative rises up main ideas that could be exemplary for all the new project in Europe.
