ILOT PS1 SUD LYON CONFLUENCE - ARCHITECTURE
PROJECT REALIZED
INTERNATIONAL LIMITED COMPETITION - FIRST PRICE
Lyon Confluence is a rather breathtaking natural landscape site that is located at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône in Lyon.
On this site, the Urbanist has designed a masterplan which reconvert a railway wasteland into a new high sustainable neighborhood. He proposed a neighborhood integrating the water issues and in the mutation of the territories. The constraint lies more on the density of lots, facing this extremely strong, dense, omnipresent landscape... Even though the built density is very high, it is the guarantor of balance between landscapes and built, between full and emptiness…
On this place, what predominates is the landscape, magnificent in between hills and these two rivers. Although here, we felt making sense of it might be trying to blend into this natural landscape, both vegetal and water landscapes. How, from our architectural lot, will we be able to break the build masses, rebuild the landscape into buildings, aiming that at the end, these buildings will diluted and disappear completely?
Architecture of reflections which melt in the “Grand Landscape” was the attitude…
In this dense lot, we imagined four blocks connected by a car park basement and a strong garden on its top, three blocks on the park and a long block along the boulevard.
One of the qualities of this project is due to the way we expressed this notion of landscape beyond the gardens. It takes to the journey, which is offered on the ground floor, the way one reads the buildings where the distributions become paths. But also the way how the lobbies are conceived as large spaces, thought as winter garden, generous living spaces: they are not only places that serve to distribute the stairs; they are real collective living spaces. There are children playing, people meeting there, discussing.
One wants to stop in places like that…
For us, it is important in new housing, in ways of thinking collective housing, to be able to conceive spaces that allow different attitudes, create the conditions for social exchanges, for conviviality, for care to neighbors...
Another crucial point for this project was to take place into a masterplan quite specific, as it was extremely precursor, from an environmental point of view: in 2005, Lyon Confluence was one of the three European urban projects chosen for the European Concerto program, which set environmental goals that were already the equivalent of law energy consummation buildings…
It is on this basis that we built our lot and, once again, it was a way for us to turn the constraint in advantage.
We worked the entire facades with double skins, with buffer areas in between a relatively porous outer skin, simple, glass and a thermal inner skin. Between the two skins, there are more or less dilated areas that create true generous extras spaces for the inhabitants.
Those three blocks are in this sense, quite particular: we imagine three solid concrete blocks, with the constraint of the few openings that allow then the “law energy consummation” standards. All around them, a kind of "glass dress" gives a circular and linear space, in continuity of the dwellings, a space full of daylight. This is truly a place that expands, more or less wide, and allows real uses in places where it will take thickness. What is also interesting is that it does give a real fluidity to housing.
In the rectilinear building, on the "loft" typologies, these areas are acting more like a protected outside extra room. These are spaces that are appropriated in turn, expansion of areas that are mostly what inhabitants decide to do with. Obviously it is a space to enjoy.
Once inside, the apartments explore a range of innovative typologies, providing generous volumes, multiple orientations, harmonious layout and a propensity for variation of use, making them extremely adaptable to individual lifestyles. The entrance halls are spacious and resemble winter gardens. Their flexible layout accentuates the permeability between inside and outside spaces, with the trees casting dappled light across the glazed surfaces, gleaming and glinting in playful concord.
To create architecture, which melts in the “Grand Landscape”, we merge the facades with the landscape. The glass facings allow us to blur the boundaries of the buildings and the landscape through the reflections. Under the changing daylight, the landscape reflected in buildings transforming them into a true virtual landscape...
The buildings are imbued landscape…