Accommodation

Park Residence

LA RESIDENCE DU PARC - Marseille 13

380 ACCOMMODATIONS

Project management	BPD Marignan
Surface	26 720 m2
Cost	34 700 000 € EXCL. TAX
Project management	Lead Architect: Caractére spécial
	Landscaper: SARAH TEN DAM
Date	2008
Mission	Competition
Photographic Credits	AMAURY GANAY

"When we give it room, when we give it time and space, nature regains its rights. Here the existing buildings have given way to nature. She has been forgotten and has found the places to grow and flourish. A city, before being an arrangement of buildings, is a soil and it is the soil here that needs to be taken care of . Preserve the greenery, extend it, relax it, enrich it so that what invites us here is first and foremost a garden. The park residence will never have borne its name so well. In a park, there are surprises, pleasure, shadows and lights, there are also clearings. Ours will become the place around which the services, the shops and the gym will be organized. It will be the place of meeting, conviviality and life of this part of the district. It is overhung by two wooden buildings where each of the huts becomes the framework of the history of those who live there. It is a kind of game that is proposed, a giant page of comic strip in three dimensions and in movement. It is a structure of reception, exchange and sharing where everyone will feel concerned. It is not the architect who imposes the facade, it is he who proposes to each one to animate these frames so that the building becomes alive.

Through this structure, designed and built without bluster, without ostentation, as close to the truth as possible, one can guess among the shadows and rays of light the framework of the existing concrete structure. All that is no longer useful, all that is ugly, all that no longer needs to be there to keep only the essential, will have been removed beforehand, and it is from there that everything becomes possible again. Why raze again, damage again, wound the ground again if we can keep what can be kept and continue to write a story in progress rather than tearing out all the pages?

It's about healing, fixing, changing, not killing. It's about a graft, a new backbone to accommodate new housing programs. The old and the new combine, dialogue and participate together in a new history.

Love stories always only talk about the beginning and the end, never about duration. Yet that's what makes them strong and beautiful.

Our project is about that, about the beauty that time takes to write a story, to stop for a moment, and to get on with one's life, like a river. You can't stop a river.

He says and shows this project, the truth and the essential."