Prefab concrete and wooden models have been given diversified facades to “cut back the sensation of repetition” at this pupil housing mission in Agen, France by Parisian studio Ignacio Prego Architectures.
Designed for the Nationwide College of Jail Administration (ENAP), the scheme affords 461 rooms set in a 15-hectare park, with which the studio needed the mission to ‘harmonise’ reasonably than disrupt.
“This mission was a problem: constructing high quality housing for a thousand residents within the coronary heart of a restricted website in lower than a yr,” defined the studio.
“This meant fixing an advanced puzzle: designing an structure that’s each standardized and welcoming,” he continued.
Ignacio Prego Architectures regarded to the idea of the backyard metropolis – the place folks reside in small cities surrounded by inexperienced belts – as a response, as a method of mixing the comparatively high-density lodging program with a “small-scale city look” such because the of a village.
Three north-south oriented blocks are separated by inexperienced ‘alleys’ by the location, framed by a collection of smaller blocks alongside the southern edge and archway-style concrete walkways to the north.
“The nine-meter-wide alleys – the scale of a road – kind a landscaped house that permits residents to flow into and stroll, creating the residential look we sought to determine,” defined the studio.
“The function of those alleys can be to introduce an element of scale, a easy transition between the campus that stretches over a number of hectares and the room of a number of sq. meters,” he added.
To stop the sensation of repetition between the blocks, they’re separated by exterior staircases and given a wide range of cladding, with uncovered brick dealing with the park and corrugated metallic panels overlooking the alleyways.
“We labored with constant supplies and colours to determine an id according to the native space,” mentioned Ignacio Prego Architectures.
“Across the plot, terracotta paving in native gentle and heat tones intrinsically harks again to the constructed panorama of the area, [and] for the alleys, the metallic cladding manufactured from powder-painted metal in the identical shades brings gentle between the buildings”, he continued.
Inside, the rooms have been designed to resemble “extra of a lodge than a residential property,” with easy, pale wooden joinery and prefabricated bogs.
With the prefabricated constructions manufactured upfront, as soon as the foundations had been in place, your entire construction may very well be inbuilt simply 11 months.
Smaller-scale urbanism additionally served as a reference level for Feilden Clegg Bradley’s crescent-shaped low-carbon pupil housing blocks for the College of Cambridge, whereas HCMA proposed to include “indigenous design ideas” into its pupil housing in British Columbia.
Images is by Luc Boegly.