The project is part of the Aménagement de la Porte Pouchet, a project to upgrade a larger area of the 17th Arondissement in Paris. Different proposals, including the refurbishment of the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre by Lacaton Vassal architects, are being carried out parallel to the operation on Rue Rebière. Our project forms part of narrow row of buildings along the ceme-tery wall of the Cimitière des Batignolles. Under the aegis of périphériques architects the 18 construction plots were divided in workshops among the various teams: 1 + 2 Hondelatte Laporte Architectes, 3 + 4 Atelier Bow-Wow. 5 + 6 Stéphane Maupin, 7 + 9 Avignon et Clouet architects, 8 + 16 Atelier Provisoire architects, 14 + 15 Bourbouze et Graindorge. EM2N worked on the end plots 17 + 18, remarkable for their acute angled shape.
The developer Opac re-quired that a free-standing building should be erected on each plot. We were interested not just in the building volumes, which on a site of this shape would clearly be extremely expres-sive, but just as much in the spaces between the buildings. Our working hypothesis was that the design of this space should be regarded as just as important as that of the buildings. By a process of cutting and adding the buildings acquire crystalline shapes and surround a shared, planted access courtyard. As regards the apartment and circulation typology we were so restricted by extremely rigid regulations that we decided to give the only unregulated areas, the balconies, an exaggerated expressive quality.
They are almost as large as the living rooms which results in a remarkably generous feeling. In a reference to Adolf Loos’ 1928 project for the Josephine Baker House on the Avenue Bugeaud the façade of our building is also striped. But whereas in Loos’ conversion project the horizontal stripes of black and white marble would have visually connected two existing buildings, we make our connecting stripes with a far more profane material: expanded metal. The difference in shade between the individual stripes is greater or less, depending on which side you look from and where the light is coming from. At the pointed corners or when the folding shutters are open the pattern jumps creating a special kind of tilt effect.
