Accommodation

The Manifest City

The Manifest City - MULHOUSE - 68

Project management	SOMCO
Surface	1 050 m2
Cost	870 000 € HT
Project management	Lead Architect: Caractére spécial
	Associated architects: Jean NOUVEL, LACATON, VASSAL, Shigeru BAN, Duncan LEWIS
	BET Structure: ING84
	BET Fluids: SARLEC
	Economics of construction: G. MORÈRE
Date	2005
Mission	Complete

Construction of 61 social housing units, 11 of which are designed by Caractère Spécialarchitecture, parallel operations with Jean NOUVEL, LACATON & VASSAL, Shigeru BAN and Duncan LEWIS.

Manifesto then!

On a virgin site, invite 5 architects to imagine a dozen social housing units chacun :
- Offer freedom to architects to choose,
- Give them the freedom to trust them to take risks,
- Ask them to work together,
Just for that alone, this city is a pure experiment, a kind of privilege almost...

Justification explicative :
To be inspired by house to make houses, To
indicate the meaning of things and let it be done, To
offer places of free appropriation.
Stop the work where the economy gives the limit, not to make cheap but to leave the project " à finir ".

Extract from Humanité :
" La Cité Manifeste is above all a manifesto économique ", explains Antoinette, who pays a rent of 330 € " chez ". Matthew POITEVIN. " Si you knew how happy I am to be able to live in a small house and have a jardin ," she blows. Like the vast majority of tenants, Antoinette comes from a traditional dwelling. She lived for 43 years in the Bel-Air housing estate, a famous housing project in the region. In her new interior, she has modelled the space according to her desires - a work " pré-détournable ", in the words of the Marseille architect. The architectural vein in which her little house was imagined plays the card of minimalism: scrap metal staircase, exposed beams, rough concrete floor, red toilets... " Je feels really safe here. That doesn't mean I live in a cage ," she says, quoting an article from Libération a few weeks ago

AFP
The designers of the project now hope that this unusual housing project will be emulated. A wish shared by Housing Minister Jean-Louis BORLOO, who came to inaugurate the city on Monday, " Je bets that this project will mark a turning point in the design of logements ," he said...
Reuters, Monday, June 20, 2005.

The Minister for Employment, Social Cohesion and Housing, Jean-Louis BORLOO, inaugurated the " Cité Manifeste " in Mulhouse, a complex of 61 social housing units, the construction of which has been entrusted to great names in architecture. " Cela is going to be conceptualized as a complete turnaround in the idea of logement ", said the Minister. " C 'is a turn as important as the charter of Athènes ", he added enthusiastically, stressing that this idea of social housing, formalised in 1936 on the initiative of French architects, had given rise to the hen cages of the 1960s. And more than 600 other publications in Europe...