Guided by the project's diverse program, Ignacio Prego Architectures + Thibaud Babled Architectures developed an architectural language of irregular cutouts. A sequence of longitudinal slits combines with a series of luminous porticos, resulting in a dynamic image, rhythmically punctuated by the alternation of high and low openings.
In response to the surrounding climatic and urban conditions, the layout of the dwellings ensures dual orientation in all typologies. Closely integrated with the surrounding context, each unit is organized as a through-unit, with two exterior extensions that enjoy, on one side, views of the city and, on the other, the serenity of the garden.
La Métropolitaine by Ignacio Prego Architectures + Thibaud Babled Architectures. Photograph by Maxime Delvaux.
Project description by Ignacio Prego Architectures + Thibaud Babled Architectures
La Métropolitaine establishes a restrained and homogeneous frontage along Avenue de la Porte de Clichy. Facing the emerging presence of the Palais de Justice, it asserts the necessary link between Paris and its suburbs, bringing order to an urban space that had until now been poorly defined and inadequately delimited.
This compact volumetry is nevertheless accompanied by other, more sequential perceptions, which enhance and animate the immediate pedestrian landscape as one moves through this new place. We take advantage of the project’s strong programmatic mix to propose a vocabulary of elongated fissures, luminous porches and irregular cut-outs: a porous and permeable organisation, rhythmically structured by the alternation of high and low breaks.
High breaks that assert the sequencing of the urban silhouette, partially decomposing it according to the proportion of the different programmes.
Low breaks that provide genuine urban transparency at street scale.
The building’s limited depth is used to give the apartments a systematic quality: that of the “fully dual-aspect” dwelling, offering all apartment types a double orientation. Thus, all the apartments, from T1 to T5, benefit from a through-layout for the main living room/kitchen space; in other words, each apartment has two outdoor extensions and two contrasting atmospheres: city and garden.
This is a contextual typological response shaped by the climatic and urban orientations at play. On the street side, to the south, an extension reaches towards the protective filter of a double skin, creating an expanded intermediate space in the form of a loggia in front of the living rooms. On the park side, to the north, an extension opens onto a private terrace that forms part of the access sequence and offers a place sheltered from urban nuisances, particularly noise and pollution.
