Inaugurated in 2005, the ‘Cité Manifeste’ is a housing project of 61 social rental dwellings in Mulhouse, France. It is located in the former Muller industrial site owned by Somco, a social housing developer. The Muller neighborhood, founded in 1853, was at the time the first of its kind: it had clear economical and social purposes. Travelling time was avoided and the time saved could turn into extra working hours since the workers were close to the factory. And, for the first time, the workers had access to individual houses in a safe and healthy environment.
One hundred and fifty years later, in the early 2000s, Somco decided to celebrate its special anniversary by once again launching an ambitious social housing operation. The goal was to bridge the gap between the wishes of the people and the usual production system in the field of social housing.
Pierre Zemp, director of Somco, wanted to bring in something new and inspiring to counter the declining and bureaucratic housing architecture and to upgrade the image of social housing. He also wanted to open social housing to new customers, as the middle classes continued to abandon it.
The Cité Manifeste would be built on the former Muller factory for people who were not workers.
The project is typical for the city of Mulhouse, which has a tradition of social, technical and cultural innovation. It takes into account the evolution of the city, the society and the lifestyles of its inhabitants.
To make this happen, the company director asked the architect, Jean Nouvel to take up the challenge. He agreed and suggested that they work with four other design teams: Poitevin & Reynaud, Lewis and Potin-Block, Lacaton & Vassal, Shigeru Ban and de Gastines. During the discussion that followed, three main themes were defined:
1. The residents should have a central and active role. They should have the ability to own their environment. This meant the architects would have to make proposals on how the personal and common areas inside and the private and public spaces outside could be integrated with each other.
2. The neighborhood should be social and give a congenial feeling to the residents. Hence, the hierarchy of the spaces would create usability.
3. There should be a good balance between the accommodation, the garden and the greenery as Emile Muller had defined in 1853.
The proposals resulting from these requirements present an exemplary character by their innovative approach in different registers:
•Urban design: The new quarter is adjacent to the Cité Muller and therefore the project offers the opportunity to improve the status of this historical neighborhood. This is ensured by the extension of the alleys of the former workers’ housing quarters and the use of the same template of its building blocks. A template based on the ‘Mulhouse Square’ – a typology of four grouped houses surrounded by a garden. There is more than cohabitation between the existing and the new quarters and a morphological continuity between them.
The way the intermediate open spaces, the alleys and passageways are organized enable the inhabitants to meet and interact easily, in a very natural way.
•Process: The architects have a dominant position in the way of working. They have been using some principles of freedom to arrange the volumes of the houses. The free plan is the key theme shared by the five designers; not ‘free’ in the sense of structural constraints like during the Modern Architecture period, but ‘free’ from the habits of the contractors just as how calculation of the rent is related to the dwelling surface.
•Volumes and Surfaces: The result of this way of working can be seen for example in the size of the dwellings. Lacaton & Vassal designed accommodations twice as large as normally expected for social housing. The other designers also managed to exceed the standard of +30 to +50%. But bigger houses are more than a question of size. It is a matter of perception of the inhabitant, his need to be able to construct his own living space, to furnish it more freely and with more fluidity. That is what the architects achieved in the Cité Manifeste; they improved the quality of use of space by increasing the capacity of housing and facilities for the inhabitants.
•Organization and New Spaces:
For Lacaton & Vassal, the greenhouse on the top floor is the multifunctional space of the house. Its structure is made of galvanized steel and transparent polycarbonate walls. A part of the greenhouse is heated and insulated; the other part has a well-ventilated roof and facade, so it can be used as a winter garden.
Another example from Poitevin-Reynaud: the garage is one of the centerpieces of the project and provides flexible spaces for various uses. It is oversized (30m2) and its door (occupying the entire width of the garage) is provided with small windows ensuring minimal natural light. It’s directly connected with the living spaces on the ground floor, in particular the kitchen, for which this is a potential extension.
•Image and Materials: In the architects’ search for a new image in the field of social housing, they implemented an expanded material library, apart from industrial ones such as concrete and steel and even unusual ones, as Lacaton & Vassal did with the polycarbonate walls of their greenhouses. Unexpectedly, most of the future residents validated the use of those materials, proving that the desire of breaking with the ordinary was more than an architectural concept. The 12% difference between the estimated budget and final accounts is still limited, given the exceptional nature of the architecture and the additional surfaces supplied by the architects. The risk of experimentation probably lies more in management costs than in construction costs.
The Cité Manifeste is one of the three most significant housing operations in France between 2000 and 2010. This is because of the ambitious nature of the project, the exceptional quality of the team (client, architects and contractors) and because of the fact that it brought about a response to a series of issues at that time, in terms of process, programme and approach in the production of housing.
It is the convergence of the three degrees (of demand: the client, of design; realization: the architects and contractors, and of use: the future residents) that validates the success of the Cité Manifeste and the identification of a majority of people to its architecture as a result of involvement and educational process. This could be an important lesson for many (social) housing projects in France and abroad.
Comments (0)