OFF & Duncan Lewis SCAPE Architecture shared with us their proposal for the Anglet Logements where they were invited to conciliate a project where the interests of protagonists are sometimes contradictory: the density of needed housing, the neighbors’ quality of living as well as the conservation of fauna and flora. This is an opportunity to invent new scenarios and to propose a strategy that reconciles history and development. More images and architects’ description after the break.
We are not in a moment of capitulation, not in a time where the history of a place is only kept by its souvenir. The question here is not about these beige, pink or white constructions. The proposed sites share an intrinsic value: the human as part of the collective memory of the neighborhood.
The fallow land as well as the fragments of plantation by remaining horticulturists will be part of the essential components of the project. They contribute as a kind of raw material for (re)shaping the site that will both, form the picture of the project and preserve its identity.
“Just like that, out of habit, I look up and I watch the top of the hill. I only see the pine wood, the broken line of peaks that appears to be lost in a low cloud, and then the deep green, dense, which always reminded me of the Green of Dante’s Hell, the one I imagined while reading a book of old engravings of Gustave Doré. To the left, I can guess new constructions that I do not want to see, beige, pink or white, built in haste; stupid chromatically mistakes that the forest tolerates and the distant sky covers with its indifference. A shoulder of a hill, I perceive at some places the curves of the road today asphalted; once path of clear soil, almost white, dotted with brown stones, trenched with two deep wheel tracks that filled up in days of rain with deep and muddy water.” (Olivier Cena – Social Gardens)
Architects: OFF & Duncan Lewis SCAPE Architecture Location: Anglet, France Client: Office public de l’habitat de Bayonne Status: Competition, December 2010 Engineer: Terrell Landscape: Cyrill Marlin Floor Area: 7 350m² NGF Budget: 8.5 M € HT
