ARL008 _ SHAKER STUDIO
Shaker Studio is a tiny project with great social ambitions.
Its design approach enabled a retired Professor of Sociology to keep his apartment in central Paris, thus contributed to keep a certain degree of social diversity in a neighbourhood about to be deserted from its middle class inhabitants under the economical pressure of wealthy foreigners in search of a fancy pied-à-terre in the City of Lights.
STORY
Shaker Studio sits in a 1666 Paris building located on the banks of the river Seine in Paris’ iconic neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The building once housed remarkable occupants such as Elisée Reclus or Gustave Eiffel. The story of Shaker Studio reflects the Parisian middle-class’ struggle to keep living in central neighbourhoods now inhabited by wealthy foreigners in search of a fancy pied-à-terre in the City of Lights. The client, a retired professor of sociology who settled in the building at a time when Saint-Germain-des-Prés was still affordable, decided to rent out a studio in his apartment in order to pay for property fees.
RATIONALIZATION / TAILOR-MADE
The brief was to design an attractive 235sqf (22m2) studio apartment to be rented out on a daily/weekly basis and on rental platform such as AirBnB. It had to be easy to maintain and offer standards that could satisfy as many potential clients as possible. It also had to stand out due to the vast array of similar choices on offer in Paris while ensuring that international visitors would find a much sought-after homely feeling there.These challenging prerequisites were partly achieved through the use of a bold material: copper tubes.
“You can’t just show up with a finished plan and expect it to work; a project has to grow.”
Diébédo Francis Kéré - Harvard Design Magazine No. 38 (2014)
Harvard Press, Boston
Inside the copper pipe that runs all around the house, run all the electrical cables. After 350 years of successive alterations, the apartment has neither a straight surface nor two parallel walls; I needed to find a material offering a large range of fittings in order to follow the odd shape of the walls.
“Industrial materials do not constraint architects so much ; they always manage to achieve extraordinary things with them.”
Frédérique Seitz – Architecture et métal en France (2011)
Edition de l’EHESS, Paris
As a standard plumbing material, copper pipes and fittings are very easy to find, handle and install. Owing to its color and conductance property, copper is also is the warmest of all metals. Most remarkably, copper has the poetic quality of showing off its history when it ages.
I made sure the construction workers did not wear gloves. At completion you could tell the history of the construction thanks to dark fingerprints where workers held the pipes while screwing them on bell hangers.
This patina quickly started to react to where the copper tubes stand: darker where the users put their hands when they enter the house, shiny where the hangers rub onto its surface and green in wet and humid spaces like in the kitchen.
As a reflection of life happening, this patina soon reached the status of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s “precious patina”.
SHAKERS
The idea of the tube as a hanging system came to me reading about the Shakers, a dissident branch of the more famous Quakers.
Now extinct because of a strict observance for celibacy, the Christian sect, often pictured as proto-modernists because of their ban of ornamentation, is more renowned for its furniture than for its architecture. And it's a shame!
Their radical sense of proportion and efficiency materialized in their interior design as three plinth literally tracing spaces and preventing furniture to damage walls. All along the highest one, at 6ft 6” (1.98m) pegs are fixed every 8”. Mirrors, candle holders, cabinets, chairs, tools... almost all of their furniture is designed to hang on those pegs. One could identify the nature of a space in relation to objects hanging on its wall: chairs in the refectory, coat hangers in front of dormitories, tools in the workshop, etc.
"Architect never invent, they transform."
Alvaro Siza – Imaginer l’Evidence (2012)
Parenthèses, Paris
Drawing my inspiration from the Shakers enabled me not to waste time and energy trying to come up with a new concept. I did not try to replicate their system literally, but abstracted the essence of their idea in order to use it as an existing set of features.
Then, I spent a lot of time finding my version of the hanging system, refining it to the point that no frame touches the wall it hangs onto. Indeed, they are positioned in a way that leaves 1/8” (3mm) for future users to arrange them freely without leaving any trace on walls.
I dream that our architecture will offer to mankind a habitat with such a poetic intensity that, pushing conventions and styles on the side, inhabitants will place objects that their heart will chose as their personal culture matures.
Jean Ginsburg – Esthétique Industrielle #60 (1963)
Architecture d'Aujoud'hui, Paris
Even though the principle was sketched, the route of the pipe was devised on site as decisions were taken inches by inches. The idea was to set a simple process which had enough flexibility to enable me to design while dealing with convoluted situations.
The kitchen space stands as a good example: Next to the sink, the horizontal tube has to descend vertically and divide in two smaller parts for the bathroom and the kitchen light switches. Above the window, on an oblique piece of the wall, has to stand a light source and finally, this composition has to compensate the lack of space by facilitating.
And Finally, from complexity resulted beauty.
"Every single event of our life comes with a specific noise. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has this power to bring us back to life."
Luigi Russolo – L’art des bruits (1913)
Marguerite Waknine, Angoulême
I composed the copper tube pathways as a musical score on which each use would have its own music, soft scraping noises from hangers in the entrance, dings and dongs from pans in the kitchen, the last click of the switch you hear at night when you turn the lights off...
ART
I pictured this studio apartment as a single room in which you eat, read, work and sleep as a dreamlike pod, a place at the threshold in between the physical and the oneiric worlds.
Entering the building on the banks of Seine, right in front of the Louvre, the user gets progressively abstracted from the fuss of the city as he climbs the crooked stairs to the fourth floor. S/he then finds herself/himself in a little , delightful shack under the roofs, only facing trees and preserved from the noises of the city.
I deliberately lost control and let myself go, I followed the moulding.
Gaston Bachelard – La Poétique de l’espace (1957)
Actes Sud, Paris
All artworks are made by me. They are designed as windows onto an imaginary world. Altogether, they make an ensemble called ‘Anthology of a House to Live In’ a visual digression about a door that wanders arround in a Haussmannian apartment.
ARL_008 Shaker Studio succeeded in contributing to keep social diversity in a neighbourhood about to be deserted from its inhabitants. The income that results from the rent is enough for the sociologist to stay and this apartment is probably the only one of this quality a young couple can offer in the neighbourhood.