urbanmakers

Expressing the human dimension of the city in a predefined form
The Bastide Niel Joint Development Zone – coordinated by the Dutch practice MVRDV – aims to extend the urban intensity of Bordeaux’s city centre on the right bank of the Garonne. Facing the 18th century “stone city”, the new district is developing a very contemporary urban form, yet deeply inspired by the European city, by its vitality, its density and its resilience. Its overall morphology is designed around heliotropic principles, which combined with height produce incredible variations.
In this design, which optimises the amount of sunlight in the streets, each block is necessarily part of a volume set by the urban planner : the roofs have long oblique lines, the heights are changing and the silhouettes are particularly unexpected.
Within this vast district, block building B09-E88 is located on the Quai des Queyries and is intended to accommodate 58 social rental housing units. In such a context, the architectural challenge consists of inhabiting the complexity of a predetermined form – which is already a challenge in itself – and of translating a united and continuous envelope between walls and roofs.
We have chosen to approach this work through minerality: here it takes on blond hues, in a continuity of materials between the brick of the façades and the tile of the roofs.
The design seeks to reveal the domestic character of the dwellings so that the envelope is not the fixed expression of a volume that is impervious to life and the city, but that it ultimately expresses the uses and scales that make up the human dimension of the city. The building’s hospitality is therefore expressed through constructive details: bays and railings, design of the lintels, entablatures, depth of the loggias, slight projections of balconies on the south façade. It is worth noting that in most situations, the windows and loggias are equipped with opaque spandrels in order to better control privacy. This arrangement seems to us fundamental for the comfort of future housing, given the high density projected for the district in the long term. It is also a question of the image of the building over time: this is why each loggia has an integrated storage cupboard.
At the centre of the project is the “vestibule”: this wide, continuous space offers interesting visual porosities for pedestrians. It will be experienced as an intermediate space between the public space and the private sphere of the dwellings.

program 54 habitations social housings client Domofrance area 4 000m² cost 7.6M€HT work full service, urbanmakers (leader achitect): SELVA&MAUGIN (associated architect) phase winning project, construction in progress label Effinergie + E2C1 Cerqual NF HQE