As France ponders why its still-smoldering suburbs erupted into three weeks of sustained rioting, one culprit singled out for blame is the soulless, high-rise concrete jungles ringing the country’s major cities.
Add last summer’s fatal fires in rundown Paris tenements, and suddenly affordable, livable public housing is a front-burner issue.
Enter the Cite Manifeste, a high-concept housing project that opened with much fanfare this summer in Mulhouse, eastern France.
Both a laboratory for new architectural ideas and — as the name suggests — an urban habitat manifesto, Cite Manifeste is a cluster of 61 terraced houses designed by five different architects.
The idea of low-rise public housing is more than a century old, but in this new guise is proposed as an answer to contemporary demands for light and space, and as a means of creating human-scale communities.
The location is no accident: Cite Mulhouse abuts France’s earliest model garden city, built in 1853 to accommodate urban factory workers.
“The ‘Mulhouse Carre’ had become obsolete, but remains much loved,” explains Pierre Zemp, instigator of the project and current director of the company, Somco, that created the original 19th-century tract and which still oversees low-rent public housing in Mulhouse.
“There is a problem today of isolation in the city. I think it is very important to bring back an individual dimension,” says Zemp. “All the houses are different and separate, but favour community. The architects have created a hierarchy of spaces: private ones, public ones and those that can be either.”
Gone the barren parking lots and notorious entrance halls of the banlieue. Each house has its own entrance, even as the district’s narrow street plan creates neighbourhoods and encourages dialogue.
France’s public housing sector — constrained by strictly regulated construction materials, rigorous safety standards and tight budgets — is not conducive to innovation. Which is one reason, says Zemp, that it made sense to bring in world-famous architect Jean Nouvel to spearhead the project.
Nouvel in turn introduced other architects: Lacaton & Vassal, Duncan Lewis with Block, and young Marseille architect Mathieu Poitevin. Zemp also brought in Japan’s Shigeru Ban — whose projects include the Centre Pompidou annex in Metz and earthquake-proof housing in Japan — to offer a non-European approach.
High design is usually considered incompatible with low costs. But the use of industrial materials kept the total budget under €6,2-million, including land purchase and architects’ fees.
Lewis and Nouvel both used Styltech, a steel-frame assemblage system; Lacaton & Vassal’s “winter gardens” are horticultural greenhouses; other elements came from the refrigeration and transport industries.
With construction costs of €600 per square metre — well below average — rents are low too: a four-room house in Cite Manifeste, for example, costs no more than its equivalent in a typical high-rise block, but can have up to 80% more floor space.
The low-rise buildings, streets and front gardens echo the neighbouring “worker’s city” from the late 19th century, but the similarity ends there. The bricks, render and tiles of yesterday have been replaced by a high-tech industrial aesthetic of steel, concrete and aluminium.
Five months after the official opening in June most of the tenants are delighted.
“The house on several levels is very agreeable, I adapted very quickly,” enthuses Madame Ciric, as she shows off the high-ceilinged, mezzanined living room designed by Shigeru Ban.
Although from the outside, it looks like a slightly kitsch cross between traditional Mulhouse housing and a bonsai hotel — with container-lorry-style pastel pink and baby blue boxes containing bathrooms and kitchen — the interior is surprisingly light and spacious.
More radical are the 14 houses designed by Lacaton & Vassal, best-known for their conversion of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. “The most important aspect was its dimensions,” explains Jean-Philippe Lacaton, who is keen that residents will adapt their own space.
“We envisaged it like a loft. One is free to ‘nomadise’ spaces. If you want, you can put a ping pong table in the living room. The conservatory can be a bedroom.”
The key element is the large winter garden or conservatory, a sort of intermediary space between inside and outside, which can serve as garden, balcony or as an extra room. Already some have become playrooms, others sprout abundant plants, another has been hung with hammocks.
The tenants remain under the microscope. Twice yearly assemblies are planned for the next five years, allowing Somco to iron out teething problems, see which elements work best and help tenants learn to live with sometimes novel materials.
Proud to show that avant-garde living is not just for the rich, Lacaton admits that you have to get it just about right from the start.
“One can’t make a prototype like with a car, it’s experimental but at the same time, it has to work, it has to be ready to be lived in.” – AFP