Housing and Nursery in Chêne-Bougeries
Project selected for the Equerre d'Argent 2017.
This green construction of 49 apartments and a nursery school is the fruit of a competition organised by the Council of Chêne-Bougeries to assign a plot of land to a cooperative for a social and architectural project.
The site plan is an articulation of six large ‘houses’, distributed two by two by large exterior landings that are integrated into the volumes of the buildings. The morphology of the building is designed to appear as an intermediate between the private houses nearby and the little apartment blocks surrounding the site, It contains a variety of apartment types ranging from 1 to 4-bedrooms through to a 10-room ‘cluster’ community apartment and 3 guest rooms as well as an underground parking lot for 58 cars.
The project has two major goals: to offer large open and shared spaces for the residents and to lean towards an energy-autonomous build. These goals are met by a number of means:
- Giving particular attention to the layout of apartments and offering appropriable parts of common spaces such as landings.
- Offer a large communal space that the residents can get together in and independent guest rooms that they can use.
- Offer a communal housing solution, or ‘cluster’, that allows for communal living for 3 renters in one apartment, all the while keeping some private spaces.
- Offer diverse exterior spaces of different types and sizes, including a permaculture vegetable garden.
- Obtain the Minergie P and Eco labels through geothermal heating solutions and hybrid thermal and photovoltaic solar panels.
The building ‘skin’ is made out of a wooden cladding surrounding the six houses and making them appear as one whole.
