BEGLES TERRES NEUVES BLOC B1 - ARCHITECTURE
PROJECT REALIZED
INTERNATIONAL LIMITED COMPETITION - FIRST PRICE
The bloc B1 presents quite a specific work on a double skin façade composed by a game of moucharabiehs white concrete panels like “corals” and glass-windows opening in accordion. This increase the relationship and the visual between open interior spaces, private spaces or open collective spaces, continuities places and the blur of the boundaries between buildings and public space, the reflection of the surrounding areas inside buildings.
By Delphine Costedoat and Michel Jacques
Tania Concko’s designs for the redevelopment of the new ‘Porte de Begles’ are the fruit of this perceptive approach, of careful analysis of the urban and architectural stakes at play across the 4.5 hectares the site covers. The district already plays home to the tower blocks of the Cite Yves-Farge and was designated for redevelopment in an aim to increase exchange between this neighborhood suburb and the city center.
Tania Concko’s response is multi faceted. At its heart lies a vast square, a place through which the neighborhood's energy flows, creating subtle links between the new buildings and linking the area strategically, harmoniously with the rest of the Bordeaux conurbation.
The expected arrangement of traditional urban elements is replaced by a composition based on sequences, in which the trapezoid formed by the square becomes an ‘urban turntable’ around which each public space is meaningfully distributed.
The design’s global vision guarantees the homogeneity of the whole, a vision which embraces diversity, refuses the easy option of the vacant central space and gives life to more unexpected perspectives which in turn create dynamic, vibrant environments for us to live and work in.
The buildings are positioned with this same desire to create varied vantage points uppermost in mind, creating a variety of different itineraries, surprising us with the new sensations and shifting perceptions they arouse, encouraging the visitor or resident to invent new uses for public spaces in tune with the way we live our lives today.
With her architect’s cap on, Tania Concko set two compact buildings along Boulevard Jean-Jacques-Bosc, each of identical volume. Each has a deep, wide gash slicing into it, in which leafy vegetation forms an agreeable arbor for collective or private use. Further outdoor areas are created by the loggias and terraces suspended along each rear facade, also graced with lush vegetation and providing additional space for daily life.
On the town square, each building is cased with a thick double skin, which, with its varying degrees of dilatation and expansion, help ‘blur our perception of volume.’ Our sense of floor change and separation is also befuddled by the accordion system designed for the windows, creating the impression that each floor merges with the next in the building’s effortless upward thrust.
A series of naturally ventilated loggias are inserted between the two layers of the outer skin to improve heat insulation and photo-voltaic panels line the buildings’ rooftops. Just like the project’s open public spaces, her more inmate housing designs here are also inspired by changing atmospheres and contrasting visual sequences. Inside, the ample hallways and corridors may easily be recuperated to provide extra living space.
The apartments are oriented either to embrace the lively activity of the city or the calm of the interior gardens and each building has a variety of different exits and entrances, replacing the unyielding linear designs of brainless housing projects with a dynamic approach inspired by an understanding of life in all its rich diversity.
Tania Concko’s approach is rigorously the same for small-scale housing design as for her vaster master-plan. ‘From the infinitely great to the infinitely small’ — such is the maxim at the root of her seemingly effortless choices, the fruit of her profoundly coherent and highly original stance.
