Construction of 5 social housing units in Courbevoie, France | Graal Architecture

The architectural purpose was to work on the transition between the public space (the city) and the private space (the home) as an active between-the-two so that a qualitative threshold between the exterior and the interior could be built. Located in a dense context characterized by both two-story townhouses and 1960s apartment houses, the project fashions a link between the two scales by creating a simple and homogeneous volume.

To lighten the relationship of the ground to the built mass, the ground floor volume has been pushed back to the interior of the plot so that, on one hand, a buffer space was created and, on the other, exterior corridors serving the units on the upper floor could be positioned in the rear.

The building benefits from the alignment on the street on this shallow plot to transform the vertical and horizontal circulations into genuine collective spaces.