"A living building, A living building is not a building with plants growing everywhere but a building that the people who live in it have made."
Promoter
Amétis
Project management
Agent Architect: Caractére spécial
Associated architect: Kristell Filotico
Date
2019
Mission
Winning Project
Eugene Pottier residence. "The Eugene Pottier residence is a project against preconceived ideas. In its current state and outside of all aesthetic considerations, the Eugene Pottier residence is like a UFO in the city. This building complex with its spacious and well-oriented apartments, marks a place where plants and trees exist for real. They offer a park that connects a completely renovated neighborhood, where the buildings resemble each other and where the traces of the popular port city of old have been carefully erased, and another one that is completely neglected, where cracks fight a desperate battle with breakage, where the buildings still stand, sometimes miraculously. This park has an important urban role, it is a real heritage in this place, a treasure that we must develop, make evolve, transform so that from simple building footings, it becomes a welcoming and warm place, a place open to all to play games, sports, gardening or even and above all to do nothing at all. It is there to be crossed or to find oneself. It is there. It is no longer possible to look at the city as if everything that has been done up to now had to be razed to the ground. It is no longer possible to consider that time does not exist. You can't cure a disease by systematically amputating. Sometimes it is even better to live with your repaired and badly damaged thing than to have to put up with an inert thing that replaces it . This urban violence can only lead to urban violence. It is high time to consider doing the city differently, with what there is and with gentleness. To say that the city is built on the city takes on its full meaning here. It will be done here with the people who have always lived here, the small shops that have managed to be preserved, the park could also be the place where patients and hospital staff pass through, young people going to the Versailles college, those working in the offices and the children and retired people in the residence. The strength and richness of this operation is its mix, grafting onto the buildings to project them into the future rather than razing them to the ground. Of course, part of the buildings will be demolished to build others and leave more room for the garden and the living and the imagination, but continuing the spirit of the place, vertically extending some buildings already there by mixed frames, wood concrete and offering here and there vast terraces and spaces to be invented. The human force is that of invention and imagination, we must trust in accompanying and this energy will make this place not just another place but the place of those who live there. Here it is not just gardens that will be shared but terraces, roofs and an entire park."
