Student housing at Gif-sur-Yvette
Completed at the end of 2018, the student housing is located at Gif-sur-Yvette, at the core of the Moulon’s ZAC on the Saclay’s plateau. New piece of the Centrale-Supelec’campus, it is designed as a unitary architectural object, in dialogue with its close environment.
The apartments, designed to host a single or several students, are located in the upper floors. The ground floor is left free to host common spaces, such as a versatile hall, a laundry, and a parking facility. Largely opened to the outside, theses spaces interact with public areas and with others buildings on the campus, therefore participating in creating freed and improvised uses.
The building is structured around two large yards, thought as landscape extensions of the student housing. The generous scale of these outside spaces encourages communal and domestic uses.
The student housing’s overall shape is the result of both urban code application, which requires the alignment along Joliot Curie’s street, and a will to offer the best living environment to future residents by focusing on windows design and sunlight. The shape arising from this work stands as a free object without main façade and tends to high formal neutrality in its given context.
The glazed brick is used as the single façade material and was selected to reflect the simplicity and regularity of the student housing’s overall shape. This material is responding to outdoor conditions such as sunlight, luminosity, humidity, vegetation... These colour variations combined to the ones of glass and windows aluminium fluctuate with subtle and common tones and thus assist a uniform architectural style and an homogeneous view of the building.
