Beauséjour house
This small project of a single-family house for a family of four raises the question of the densification of the suburban fabric and answers it by a pure architectural exercise.
It questions the banality, the daily life and plays with the contradictions of the site.
If the program is simple, the constraint arises from the very small dimensions of the plot, resulting from a division, coupled with the urban planning rules which are the deep template of the nearby built context.
At the same time, another opposition underlies the project, its relationship to the site, torn between the tenuous character of the allotment and the immensity of the alpine landscape barely further away.
In these cases, our most effective tools are then structure and geometry. To set up a simple structural grid of beams & columns that refers to the Grenoble adventure around reinforced concrete and echoes the facades of its buildings from the beginning of the century. That is the part that speaks to the domestic scale, that of the villa.
At the same time, a reinforced concrete arch is installed to cover and protect a terrace along the living rooms. This structurally autonomous element is out of scale and refers to an infrastructural imaginary, that of civil engineering which seeks to dialogue with the peaks facing it, trying to overlook its surrounding.
