CONCOURS D’IDÉES D’ARCHITECTURE - CONCEPTION D’UN IMMEUBLE DE STANDING EN PRINCIPAUTÉ DE MONACO
CONCEPT
The building is generated by the park.
Its architecture expresses the condition of being both part of its surrounding nature and a wonderful place to live and journey through its panorama.
The park gains in the building.
It shapes the facades.
It invades the loggias and creates an inner garden, the core of the building.
The three levels of commercial space, the spa level and the house keeping staff residences are developed around the inner gardens.
The lateral facades are shaded by a wooden brise-soleil that provides both privacy and a natural feeling, recalling the buildings surroundings.
The terraces hence become private gardens in continuity with the Casino garden.
The residential levels host one apartment per floor, utilizing this 4 facade condition for each flat.
PROGRAM
The tender calls for residential floors above commercial/office spaces all served by a triple level lobby.
Our proposal chooses to optimize the possibilities offered by the exceptional qualities of the site, creating layout containing one luxury apartment per floor. This choice can be easily changed if real estate opportunities suggest different subdivision options.
The project has an 18 usable floor layout:
- 5 for parking spaces, for up to 115 car spaces
- 1 for the spa
- 1 for residence staff
- 3 for the luxury lobby
- 8 for residences (level 7 and 8 are duplex with a private roof terrace)
This is obtained by differentiating the garage level heights, that can be reduced using an automatic elevating system that avoids the usage of drivable ramps, gaining room for additional parking area.
The particularity of the building code, with the difference in building height between Av. de la Madone and Bld. des Moulins, becomes a quality in the project, originating in apartments with slightly different floor and ceiling heights.
This device allows the building to gain the 8th floor respecting the city code heights.
In particular, our project uses 5 liveable floors for the lobby, offices, and stores, allowing for more space for the services to the residential floors, the main function of the building.
In fact we have inserted these two levels in a ‘sandwich’ between the residential and garage floors.
The green slopes on the side are able to provide natural light all the way down to the spa level, which also opening on the inner garden, becoming the new ground level.
VISION
The building is intended to be a sophisticated structure that supports the park allowing it to grow towards the light of the sky along the terraces of the apartments.
The building is generated through the use of nature and glass.
The slabs, the brise-soleil and the ceilings are built African wood
A glass volume embraces the totality of the living spaces.
The shifting between basement, the mass of the building and its cover is reflected through the shifting of the glass facades. This is a contemporary response to the traditional Monegasque way of characterizing civil architecture.
Part of the terraces can be treated as real gardens. Moreover the living space can be completely opened to the landscape. Indeed the sliding glass panels’ opening system provides for three opening solutions that also leave the corners empty. This allows the continuity from inside out, making the internal and external space a unique thing.
LANDSCAPE
The introduction of living systems in a highly artificial environment, as is a contemporary architecture building, demands complex artifices that simulate natural conditions and ensure plant viability, with bold technical solutions.
The existence of a wide range of luxuriant indoor plants, where little sunlight reaches and with low atmospheric humidity, implies an important compensation in the radiation input and irrigation, allowing the metabolic performance and therefore the survival of the plants.
The exterior groundcover plantations, on the other hand, require a cautious maintenance and control of their development, because the green aspect is necessarily related with its vigorous growth, which implies pruning and other specialized work. Periodic accurate and expert maintenance is essential.
The landscape architecture intervention concept is based on the introduction of a vegetation system that meanders, involves and cuts across the proposed architecture, creating an exotic and luxuriant ambiance as an extension of the contiguous Monte-Carlo Casino Gardens, underlining the direct access to the garden named for its exuberance « La Petite Afrique ».
