2in1 Houses

The two back to back houses share the site’s steep topography at the foot of Noisy fortress hill. They are sheltered under a single bi-plan roof to accompany their half-level shift going up the slope. The building’s implantation pursues the broken frontline of downstream houses following the route’s curve, keeping an important distance from the upstream house to create a visual breakthrough towards the hill’s natural landscape. A void dug in the roof‘s volume opens the back side of the front house to that landscape, reducing simultaneously cast shadows to the neighboring plot.

To connect the project to its site, the back part’s upper floors are suspended over an independent timber wall joining horizontaly the hill’s slope. Their inbetween glass screen’s void continuity is ensured by moving back a supporting column, revealing at the same time the voluntery distinction between structural frame and filling panels. The low carbone reinforced concrete choice allows to mold a hull anticipating all project’s spatialities, while generating an important inertia mass. All filling materials are raw and recyclable, timber, anodized aluminimum and glass. Their implementation on each side of the building adresses their specific situation, bird’s eye view towards the parisian valley on the northwest street side, and low angle view towards the fortress hill on southeast. A single timber mega-pannel forms the front facade occultation integrating roller and butterfly shutters as well as a guardrail, a warm face. On the opposite view-free side a combination of glass walls including the terrace’s roof deploy every inhabitable space towards the landscape and sky horizons, a cold face.

The forecast implementation of several removable occultation layers, interior and exterior, turns both facades into adjustable envelopes, capable of increasing or reducing their thermal resistance and porosity according to their exposure and meteorological conditions. Thermal inertia of the structure, as well as incorporated vegetal masses act like a «heat-freshness tank», slowing the rate of temperature change in all interior premises following the day-night course. This maximisation of the building’s capacity to auto-regulate naturally its comfort seeks to respond, effectively and sustainably to the seasonal variations amplitude, and furthermore in longer term to the climate ones. These architectural devices are perfected by the stairwell use as a ventilaton shaft connecting and naturally aerating all four levels of each house including the basement. That type of organisation, referring to a vertical habitat model, looks forward to potential uses reversibility or functional divisions, each floor constituting a single use open space.