Dwellings rue Père Corentin

Roof, Terraces and Stepped Facade
The project that RATP has entrusted to us consists of the realization of 2 housing buildings imbricated with a bus center. In a specific and referenced work based on emblematic Parisian operations such as the building of the Atlas passage designed by Eugène Beaudoin and Marcel Lods or the one by Henri Sauvage located rue Vavin, the first building of our operation, implanted rue du Père Corentin, presents a stepped facade combined with terraces to solve the wide gap existing between the buildings that surround it : a R+2 Mansart-type pavilion and a R+12 building resulting from the modernity implanted freely in disregard of any alignment.

This work of graduation also emanates from a desire to open this very narrow street to the sun, to the sky, and to desaturate the noise of the street by avoiding the bottleneck of 2 facades strictly in vis-a-vis. Thus, every dwelling offers a possibility to plant on the entirety of the linear of its facade and contributes to the realization of a future suspended oblique garden in the perspective of the street.

The second building, in the heart of the block, is sculpted by the basic requirements of urban courtesy. The volume is compact, gathered under a huge roof. The morphology of the work is thus composed of edges and inclined faces which erase its presence as the construction rises. The volume is dense with a shift of its mass from west to east expressing a slight balance where the center of gravity is almost outside the volume.

We want to preserve and express this object as a monolith. Covered with an unifying anthracite gray zinc skin, it sounds like a dense smooth boulder, protected from the tumult of the city and yet widely open to the city. Hyper-contextual, ultra-specific, the project modeled by the constraints of the site, is a link, a synthesis between two urban territories, mixing the intensity of the city and an endless green lung suspended in the sky of Paris.

RATP

ecdm architects: Emmanuel Combarel and Dominique Marrec