Architectural Reay-Made

In the construction field, even “green” buildings often generate an over-production of materials, becoming energy-vores and clients of factories, the main polluters of the world.
An important way to combat this is by the reappropriation of materials and experimentations with ready-made objects.

This student housing on Paris’s rue Amelot is a project slipped into an urban interstice: the thickness of a blind wall. It is within the thickness of these walls that this thin building is constructed.
The form is a pure geometrical extrusion of the blind wall; no buildings are destroyed, and no pollution generated.

The skin consists of an easily upcycled, existing module: the wooden pallet. Held using horizontal hinges, the pallets contract toward the top, allowing privacy or large openings.

The modularity of the various palettes creates varied geometries, which are based on use and constantly regenerated.

The reappropriation of materials recycles the existing without any new additional processing, which would consume energy in production and create byproduct pollution.

A wise environmental approach would consist of mandating preservation, adopting new urban policies forbidding destruction, and encouraging the superimposing of interventions upon our built landscape.

It requires a new land strategy, unreferenced on a parcel, constructed in a de facto “ecology” of means.