Hasta La Ideas

A layer of grasses, herbs and flowers blankets the roof of this hump-shaped house near Reims, France, by architect Patrick Nadeau (+ slideshow).

Named La Maison-vague, which translates as Wave House, Patrick Nadeau‘s project is one 63 experimental houses being built in the commune of Sillery, near Reims, and was designed with an arching profile to resemble the shape of a mound or hill.

Plants wrap around the east and west facades, primarily to provide thermal insulation but also to allow the house to fit in with its rural surroundings.

“The traditional relationship between house and garden is changed, disturbed even; the project encompasses both in the same construction,” said Nadeau.

The architect worked alongside Pierre Georgel of landscape design firm Ecovégétal to design a planting scheme that encompasses herbs such as thyme and lavender alongside sedums, grasses and various other perennials.

“The plants were selected for their aesthetic qualities and their ability to adapt to the environment,” he said. ” The technical challenge lay primarily in the steep slope that required the development of innovative systems for the maintenance of land and water retention.”

An automatic watering system is integrated into the structure but is only intended for use during severe drought conditions.

Timber was used for the entire structure of the house. An arching wooden frame creates the curved profile, while a raised deck lifts the building off the ground and creates an outdoor seating area.

The north and south elevations are clad with transparent polycarbonate, which screens a mixture of clear glass windows and opaque timber panels.

The front entrance leads directly into an L-shaped living and dining space that occupies most of the ground floor of the house. A kitchen and bathroom are tucked into one corner, while a spiral staircase leads up to a pair of bedrooms on a mezzanine floor above.

Here’s a project description from Patrick Nadeau:

La Maison-vague / Patrick Nadeau

The project context is based on experimentation, and initiated by the public housing council of Reims (HLM – l’Effort Rémois) – in a subdivision of 63 lots with heavy economic constraints.

La Maison-vague uses vegetation for its architectural and environmental qualities, particularly in terms of thermal insulation. A fully vegetated shell protects the interior from summer heat and winter cold. The basic form is to encapsulate within a single mat of vegetation that undulates and floats above the ground, at sitting height (the rim surrounding the wooden shelf is kind of a big bench). The traditional relationship between house and garden is changed, disturbed even, the project encompasses both in the same construction.

Inside, the volumes are also very simple. The ground floor, living room, kitchen and multimedia space can be opened by sliding walls. Upstairs, two bedrooms are separated by a bathroom, which is accessed by a mezzanine.

Particular attention is paid to interior and exterior relationships. The terrace at the back of the house extends to the areas of the ground floor, for example, to dry in the sun after bathing.

Upstairs shower space is enclosed by a bay window opening onto a panorama of nature. A sectional view that shows the inner and outer volumes does not exactly follow the same form. The inner space is drawn, at the top, by a semicylindrical shell and, on the ground floor by large cabinets restoring vertical walls, which includes a wardrobe, library, media storage and kitchen furniture.

The house is built entirely of wood (structure, hull and facades gears). Only the foundation is concrete. The thermal performance is ensured by the north-south orientation, the vegetation of the hull and double wall facades. The outer walls are made of polycarbonate and the inner walls of glass and wood. A small wood stove in the living room provides heating for the entire space.

The vegetation has been designed with Pierre Georgel (Ecovégétal). The house is covered with soil that mimics that of a natural slope. The technical challenge lay primarily in the steep slope that required the development of innovative systems for the maintenance of land and water retention.

The plants were selected for their aesthetic qualities and their ability to adapt to the environment (resistance over time and minimal maintenance). It is a mix of sedums, grasses, thyme, lavender and other perennials and small aromatic herbs that are distributed according to the inclination of the hull. An automatic watering system is provided but it is only reserved for periods of very severe drought.

The house is alive, changing its appearance, colour and odour with the seasons. New plants can be brought by the wind, insects or birds and gives the building a certain character or even a fallow ground-wave, hence the name La Maison-vague, which could equally and poetically signify an ocean wave or an open field (terrain vague).

Surface area: 110 m2
Place of construction: the commune of Sillery near Reims

Client: Effort Rémois
Project management: Patrick Nadeau
Technical Consultant: AD & Services
Vegetation (experimental): Ecovégétal

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by Patrick Nadeau appeared first on Dezeen.

French studio Perraudin Architecture has completed a social housing complex with solid stone walls near Toulouse as part of a bid to prove that “anything that is built today could be built in stone” (+ slideshow).

Perraudin Architecture, which also recently completed a stone house in Lyon, specified huge 40 centimetre-wide blocks of limestone for the walls of the three-storey building located within a new residential district of Cornebarrieu, north-west of Toulouse.

“Stone is the most abundantly available material on earth,” said architect Marco Lammers. “It is an extremely energy-efficient resource […] and, when used with intelligence, it can be cheaper than concrete.”

The studio treated this project as a case study to test whether stone can be used for buildings that need to adhere to both a tight budget and strict energy-saving requirements, and managed to deliver on both counts.

According to the architect, the load-bearing stone walls will provide a natural air conditioning system that absorbs excess heat and releases it gradually.

“The result is a truly contemporary stone architecture, rooted in the economy of simplicity and the pure tectonic art and pleasure of building,” said Lammers.

No paint or plaster was added to the walls, so the stone surfaces are left bare to display traces of the quarrying process. Projecting courses of stone on the exterior mark the boundaries between floors and help to direct rainwater away from the windows.

A total of 2o apartments are contained within the building. Bedrooms are positioned along the northern facade, allowing living rooms to be south-facing and open out to sunny terraces.

Larch was used for doors, window frames and shutters throughout the complex, and are expected to show signs of ageing over time.

Perraudin Architecture is now working on the next phase of the project, which will involve the construction of a larger housing complex using the same materials palette.

Photography is by Damien Aspe and Serge Demailly.

Here’s more information from Perraudin Architecture:

Massive Stone Social Housing, Cornebarrieu, France

Since its rediscovery of stone Perraudin Architecture has come to believe that anything that is built today could be built in stone.

After realising several massive stone buildings – including wineries, single housing and a school campus – the opportunity to build 20 social housing units in Cornebarrieu provided an excellent test case. Is it possible, to truly build in stone within the strictest of economical and energetic restrictions? With a brief featuring both a very limited budget of 1150 euro/m² and the strict demand to be granted the label ‘Very High Energetic Performance’ within the French standard of High Environmental Quality?

The result is a truly contemporary stone architecture, rooted in the economy of simplicity and the pure tectonic art and pleasure of building. An architecture made to age and made to last, searching to exploit to its maximum the great visual, environmental and structural qualities of its used materials.

The building is entirely built up in load-bearing limestone walls of 40 cm. Precise coursing elevations define each stone, to be extracted, dimensioned and numbered in the quarry and then transported to the site. There, they are assembled like toy blocks using nothing but a thin bed of lime mortar.

Each detail is a true stone detail. Large openings are formed by flat arcs with keys stones. Window sills are dimensioned in limestone. All perforations for ducts and for descending the rainwater from the roof are included in the coursing plan and carried out at the quarry. At the height of the concrete floor slabs ‘cornices’ project rainwater free off the building’s walls all the while doubling as guide rail for the blinds.

The building is located at the outskirts of Cornebarrieu, a town within the metropolitan area of Toulouse. It is part a new residential neighbourhood extending the town towards its forested western edge.

It is based on a series of simple principles, which we have come to apply and refine over time. All materials are left untreated. As much as possible, all materials are left untreated, with no paint, no plaster. The woodwork is in larch, left to age with time. The stone acts as natural air conditioning, its thermal mass absorbing and releasing surplus heat and humidity. For reasons of comfort and ventilation, the housing units are systematically continuous from facade to facade.

The bedrooms are in the north to take advantage of the summer freshness while on the south side a large terrace extends the living room, with nothing but a glass wall as separation. The staircases remain in open air and to enter the apartment one enters by the loggia. Flexible blinds protect this terrace and allow it to be used as a buffer-space softening climatic variations.

Life within this housing unit moves with the weather, one can activate and deactivate its great thermal mass while spaces change dynamically from being inside to outside according to the seasonal comfort.

The project has been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, the Equerre d’Argent 2011, and was winner of the Prix Développement Durable – Concours d’architecture Pierre Naturelle 2011.

Furthermore, the building has been finished within budget with its stone construction finishing well ahead of schedule. Due to this success, we are currently building the second phase of the development – 86 collective and individual housing units, partly social – using the same construction method and a budget below 1000 euro/m².

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by Perraudin Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

French studio Perraudin Architecture has constructed a family house out of solid stone, claiming the material is “cheaper and faster” to build with than concrete.

Architect Marco Lammers said limestone had been chosen for economic reasons. “Stone itself is not an expensive resource,”  he said. “Its manufacturing is. Therefore, the greater its mass, the lower its price and the greater its qualities.”

The house is located in Croix Rousse in Lyon – a dense former silk-weaving district – and is positioned in a small backland plot behind an art gallery.

Perraudin Architecture designed the building to match the typical local architecture, which features solid stone walls and windows large enough to fit silk looms through.

“Massive stone – when used with intelligence – allows to build cheaper and faster than ‘classical’ construction methods like […] concrete,” the architects claim.

Lammers told Dezeen that using stone for load-bearing construction is far more efficient than applying it as a cladding material and creates energy-efficient buildings without high price tags.

“When used constructively in its raw massive form, stone is load-bearing, has great qualities of thermal mass, absorbs and releases surplus humidity, does not degrade and thus literally makes timeless architecture,” he said.

“Arguably, the least intelligent use of stone thinkable is to cut it in thin slices and to hang it decoratively on structural walls,” he added.

The two-storey residence has an L-shaped plan that wraps around a small garden and swimming pool. Both floors feature floor-to-ceiling windows, and the stone walls are left exposed on the inside as well as the outside.

Ground floor spaces are arranged in a sequence where large family rooms are broken up by utility areas such as bathrooms and closets. These smaller spaces sit within compact stone volumes that support the flat roof overhead.

The architect added: “As stone is a subtractive rather than additive material, the domestic landscape architecture has a vocabulary of rifts, carvings, cracks and recesses.”

Here’s more information from Perraudin Architecture:

Massive stone house, Lyon – Croix Rousse, France

This single family house finds itself in the hearth of Croix-Rousse, one of the densest neighbourhoods of Europe. The quarter is heavily marked by its thousands of former home-workshops of the “canuts” – the silk weavers of the 19th century Lyonnais silk manufacturing.

An urban tissue of high, massive stone buildings with large window openings carrying heavy oak floor structures that allow for the high open spaces needed for the Jacquard looms that were used for weaving the silk tissue.

Located in a hearth of a housing block at the back of the art gallery it extends, the possibilities to build are strictly limited by complex urban regulations. Therefore, the envelope of the house follows exactly the authorised maximum volume, with its spaces ‘carved out’ of this given envelope.

Within this rigid shell, the spaces are positioned one after the other forming a continuous scenic route. Due to the limited depth of the maximum envelope, the layout is organised as alternating service and served spaces, with the service-spaces (bathroom, storage, stairs, toilets…) forming massive blocks of stone that support the roof. With its reinforced contrast between mass and emptiness, between lightness and darkness, with its pierced and recessing mass, the playful and liberated inner world contrasts strongly with the outer world blocked in regulation.

Being closer to physical geography than to architecture, the service blocks arrange themselves in a route connecting and separating one living space from another. As stone is a subtractive rather than additive material, the “domestic landscape architecture” has a vocabulary of rifts, carvings, cracks and recesses.

The service blocks define by contrast the living voids, orienting them towards the small garden they surround. The freshness generated by the basin completes this architectural geography.

Structurally, all floors are supported by the service blocks, with each block uniquely built up out of massive – structural – stone. The large blocks of dimension stone making up its masonry have been sculpted and assembled block by block after being cut precisely in the quarry. Delivered element by element, they were quickly mounted as if it were blocks in a toy building game.

About Perraudin Architecte and the use of massive stone as primary construction material

Perraudin Architecture is an office with a long history in forefront sustainable architecture – with as most notable example the Akademie Mont Cenis (Herne, Germany, 1999, awarded with the Holzbaupreis and the European Solar Prize, Prize for Solar Building and of the first large energy-neutral buildings).

Since 1998 the office rediscovered massive, structural stone as contemporary building material, starting to use a standardised module of large blocks of 2,00 x 1,00 x 0,50 meter of massive stone – or half of the unit size of stone as extracted directly from a quarry – as primary (structural) building material. Since, the office has proved the potential of massive stone as an elegant, sustainable, economical, and widely available local material in numerous of its buildings.

Most notable is the construction of 20 units of social housing in Cornebarrieu (project nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, the Equerre d’Argent 2011, and winner of the Prix Développement Durable – Concours d’architecture Pierre Naturelle 2011). It proves massive stone – when used with intelligence – allows to build cheaper and faster than ‘classical’ construction methods like the use of armed concrete, all the while using very limited energy to extract and place (dry construction!) and having great tectonic and tactile qualities.

As each building we had built so far was based on the rather strict geometric base, this massive stone house in Lyon was the first project to allow us to demonstrate the extreme flexibility of stone, exploiting to the maximum its plastic qualities.

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by Perraudin Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

by David Graver and Katie Olsen Everybody has a recommendation to offer regarding a trip to Paris; those who have visited “La Ville-Lumière” claim a favorite spot and are ever-eager to share it. Generally, however, they’re all quite personal or, on the contrary, quite touristy. It’s a city known for…

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Patients at this health centre on the outskirts of the French town of Selles-sur-Cher can look in towards a small landscaped garden or out at the surrounding fields while they sit in the waiting room (+ slideshow).

Paris studio Oglo developed a simple visual language of white one-storey buildings with vertical windows to unite the various healthcare facilities, which include the offices of doctors, a dentist, a nurse, a physiotherapist, a pharmacy and a medical laboratory.

“While preserving the autonomy of each health practitioner by creating independent spaces for each profession, the project’s architecture aims to reflect the unity that stems from the coming together of the different competencies on site,” said the architects.

Located on a suburban estate, the banality of the surrounding landscape led Oglo to position the buildings so they face each other and look onto a large landscaped area across access roads and parking spaces.

“By taking advantage of the zone’s low density, the project engages in a particular relationship with the landscape and the planted areas at its centre,” explained the architects.

Narrow openings punctuate the walls of each building and allow a soft light to enter the treatment rooms.

A waiting room at the centre of the complex features full-height glazing on two sides so patients can look out onto the courtyard or the fields beyond the buildings.

The project was financed by its occupants and the simple architectural style and choice of robust materials were a direct result of the need to minimise costs.

Photography is by Sébastien Morel.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

Pôle Santé Val de Cher, Selles-sur-Cher, France

We believe that one of the major challenges of multidisciplinary health centers is to encourage health professionals to practice in rural environments. With that in mind and in order to improve the conditions in which they practice medicine (office size, growing crowds, timeworn premises etc.), 12 professionals appointed Mister Alain Feraud in the fall of 2010 as their project lead. They put him in charge of organizing an architecture contest for 5 general medicine offices, 1 dental office (2 chairs), 1 nurse’s office (2 rooms), 1 physiotherapist office (6 rooms), 1 pharmacy, and 1 medical lab; Oglo was the winner of that contest.

The ability to adequately synthesize the needs of all, the unifying qualities of Alain Feraud, the investors’ attentive ear, and the deep trust that was established between the clients and the architects created the ideal framework for a project oriented as much towards the patients as towards the professionals who treat them.

Since the plot is incorporated in a tertiary activity sector with little density, without any particular landscape interest and away from living areas, the project tried from the onset to create a spatial inwardness while welcoming numerous personal vehicles. Forming a central courtyard, the buildings design a welcoming and unifying heart for the different health professions. The outside appearance of a dynamic landscaped path between the public space and the Pole Santé makes up a large garden open to the public.

While preserving the autonomy of each health practitioner by creating independent spaces for each profession, the project’s architecture aims to reflect the unity that stems from the coming together of the different competencies on site. The handling of one-story high elements, in accordance with the investors’ demands, along with the paved pedestrian pathways, further underline a certain architectural home character. The simplicity and lightness of the volumes built generate the indispensable calm to “heal” and “be healed”, while developing a rational and efficient work tool.

Patients navigate around the slightly opened curve formed by the exterior and easily find their way to the chosen practitioner. The main waiting room, in the center of the configuration, is part of a space composed on two sides of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, opening to one side on the courtyard and to the other on the landscape.

The vertical and relatively narrow openings of the offices provide the healing spaces with a soft and uniform light that preserves intimacy. They form a pattern on the exterior of each office and underline the unity of the project. The implantation of the volumes creates a dynamic process through the numerous view points and the different amounts of sunshine on each façade.

As the project is incorporated in an activity site, it also seeks to revisit a piece of territory whose architecture and usage are in principle not very attractive. By taking advantage of the zone’s low density, the project engages in a particular relationship with the landscape and the planted areas at its centre. The simple expressions and the use of traditional and reliable materials (isolation, partitions and acoustic ceilings…) have aimed to optimize construction costs as much as to ensure low maintenance expenses.

The total amount of those costs match precisely the objectives set by each of the professionals, who financed the totality of the project themselves. Beyond the financial aspect, with economic and social coherence in mind, the materials chosen have made possible the sole participation of local enterprises. The Pole Santé now represents an attractive medical legacy for the generations of professionals to come.

Architect: Oglo
Project Team: Emmanuel de France, Arnaud Dambrine
Mechanical Engineer: RBI
Pharmacy interior design: Sartoretto Verna
Year: 2013
Location: Selles-sur-Cher, France
Client: SCCV Pôle Santé Val de Cher
Client Assistant: Alain Feraud
Project area: 936 sq m
Site area: 5990 sq m
Photos: Sébastien Morel

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health centre by Oglo appeared first on Dezeen.