A care house like a landscape...
Wonderlad is a residential and care house to welcome children suffering from serious diseases and their families. How to provide the greatest comfort to these children? How to offer a paradise regained?
We designed this house as a landscape: architecture gives way to a structural wooden grid, forming a homogeneous medium in which vegetation will be able to reassert itself. We want to encourage biodiversity by maintaining a gentle relationship with the natural environment: local flora will colonize the roof, while fauna will not feel the house as a hostile obstacle. For this reconciliation with nature, we offer sick children a new Garden of Eden, a serenity and well-being found.
The land is laid out in 4 landscaped strips creating successive filters to protect children:
- a welcome strip: in contact with the city, with 86 landscaped parking places,
- a friendliness strip: “green” square welcoming visitors and providing area of relaxation to the residents, with rest areas away from trees,
- the care House: hybrid between architecture and nature,
- a protected recreational strip: at the back, the house just create a natural protection.
… using passive solar energy
In order to achieve energy self-sufficiency, the project is entirely based on passive use of solar energy. All living areas (residences, nursery, studying rooms, play room, lounge, offices) are condensed in a compact "Mondrian" plan and protected by an insulating envelope with no thermal bridge. At the front of the Living Areas, we placed a large sunroom stretching across the south facade. This 350m² sunroom is both: welcoming visitors hall, gallery distributing all living areas, a pleasant place of botanical discoveries, a dreamlike meeting place similar to "Versailles Orangery".
This large sunroom forms a buffer space able to capture heat and distribute it to the living areas as needed:
- In winter, the glass surfaces capture solar radiation and heats the air trapped inside the greenhouse. By opening windows between the greenhouse and the interior, an air current can heat living areas by convection,
- In summer, opening windows of the greenhouse to the outside allows the cooling of air during the night.
A pleasant atmosphere of walk through the woods
All surfaces of the building has wooden features (interior and exterior, structure and sub-trades). This unit of material, we want to create a simple and beautiful atmosphere, like a pleasant walk through the woods. The poetry of the place lie in the shadows and lights: the sun filtering through the leaves of the trees and the wooden lattice, views from the living areas on the sunroom and the surrounding landscape.
This aesthetic bias is reflected in the simplicity of the constructive system: load-bearing walls are designed in micro-laminates beech wood panels, while a wooden lattice supports the roof and the sunroom glazing, all in a frame of absolute regularity.
This compact and efficient design allows budget optimization: identical sizing of repetitive elements, no basement, no upper floor, no stairs, no elevators.
This constructive system is extensible, allowing the building to grow to accommodate new residences.
