Maison Koya

Multigenerational Residence

“Everything is a story before it becomes a fact “ - Jacques Rancière

Temporality and Program

The Maison Koya project proposes a variation on the concept of temporality. The site is part of a real estate development on the approaches to the town of Saint-Sauveur in the Laurentians. This area is in Montréal’s second ring of outlying communities, where the occupants have chosen to settle to combine a lifestyle in a natural mountainous setting, with the conveniences of a small regional town. They have also chosen to make their project multigenerational, by allocating spaces for grandparents and their children.

There is thus a temporal relationship, which poses an interesting problem for the design of this residence’s spaces. We are interested in the changing nature of the program, the family composition and the residents’ location in the spaces that are bound to change over time within the complex.

The Footprint: Inscribing Time

The project instead revolves around this temporal relationship, by structuring a mode of implementation
related to the topographical features rather than to a logic of single-family row housing, typical of suburban areas. The project’s morphology materially distinguishes the more permanent elements of the residence, in concrete, from the more ephemeral components in wood. Like a sculptural bas-relief, the main traffic axes on the site become the two axes of composition of the complex. Different concrete retaining walls, landings and transitional stairways install a new topography on the site, a conclusive structuring for what happens next. Deep geothermal boreholes “anchor” the composition in sustainability and address the energy needs metaphorically rather than in strictly technical terms.

Three wooden volumes are then deposited on the exterior of this new topography to accommodate the changing nature of the program. They are cantilevered on the concrete structures, in an unstable situation, and point respectively in opposite directions. Thus, this complex is detached from a conventional composition of the suburban single-family home, which often has a very distinct expression between the front and rear facades, to the complete detriment of the sides. Maison Koya instead seeks to establish a more open relationship with the site in the broader sense.

By configuring a formal coherence with the whole, and not establishing any marked hierarchy in relation to the place, we establish a critical posture regarding the hegemony of urban planning standards, similar from one city to another, which finally dictate uniform spatial arrangements, trivializing the relationship between life and space. The morphology here instead attempts, by multiple sawtooth patterns and small
outdoor subspaces, to establish a diversified reading of the landscape, regardless of the structure of the lots or a single landscape component.