A Bordeaux, signé COSA, registre monumental pour Amédée
In the Amédée Saint-Germain district of Bordeaux (Gironde), the Parisian agency COSA (Benjamin Colboc and Arnaud Sachet) has built a block of 214 housing units (174 social rental units, 40 for social accession) with superstructure parking for 193 spaces and development of a central garden. Delivery 2023. Press release.
The Amédée Saint-Germain district is being built on the fringes of the railway estate, between the suburbs of shops in the old town of Bordeaux and industrial remains. If the articulation with the city of stone easily passes through a fragmentation of the built masses, how to dialogue with this railway and industrial landscape, which nevertheless constitutes, from the Saint-Jean station, one of the gateways to the metropolis?
The Amédée project
The mixed Amédée project – 16,393 m² (1,270 m² outdoor spaces) and 193 parking spaces – develops the idea of meta-architectures, when an architecture is overtaken, or even exceeded, by the scale or the programs it welcomes. The operation of 214 housing units and parking silo is part of the footprint of a block of shops in Bordeaux. It also adopts its blond minerality. Its twelve levels allow it to dialogue with the railway landscape and the skyline of the neighboring offices. But how to make the whole coexist?
The building adopts the monumentality necessary for dialogue with the site. It is presented by pilasters of moucharabieh running on four levels, offering privacy and uses to the balconies. Urban windows per cent of the built mass, frame views between the garden in the heart of the block and the city, while offering housing multiple orientations.
Through, double-oriented, triple-oriented, distributed by landings or passageways, large or small, with balconies on the city for the view or loggia on the heart of the block for privacy, each apartment is unique, each specific situation . A silo car park surmounted by corridors distributing housing oriented towards the heart of the block shelters noise pollution from the railway tracks. The set draws a monumental arch marking this landscape of access to the metropolis of Bordeaux.
The garden is at the heart of the device, extending the landscape qualities of the neighboring streets into the building, raising it to the hanging garden on the fifth level, on the roof of the parking silo. The garden is well planted, a bit wild. It limits vis-à-vis and brings freshness in summer.
It is thus, between intimacy and monumentality, between domestic and infrastructure, between district and territory, that this architecture is declined.
Monumental register
The monumental register of the Amédée project dialogues with the immensity of the bundle of railway tracks, like that of the buildings populating it through a series of attentions: its size, the partition of three levels of the neighboring tertiary program translated into four levels of housing…
On the scale of the pedestrian, the treatment of the base, the landscaping, the openings towards the garden or the halls, the rhythm of the moucharabiehs, makes the building appropriate.
Monumental porches establish visual continuities towards the garden at the heart of the block. They demonstrate the organization of the overall plan into a series of plots connected by residential bridges. Each plot has its hall, its distributions, its building life.
The car park develops in a silo, rather than in the basement, along the railway tracks to form an acoustic and vibratory rampart and frees the garden from the open ground at the center of the operation.
The monumental urban windows present the hanging garden of the heart of the block towards the old town, reinforcing the dialogue with the neighborhood and multiplying the orientations of the housing. One of them will be occupied by a sculpture by Nicolas Milhé.
The garden is at the heart of the device, extending the landscape qualities of the neighboring streets into the building, raising it to the hanging garden on the fifth level, on the roof of the parking silo. The garden is well planted, a bit wild. It limits vis-à-vis and brings freshness in summer.
The heavy Amédée ladder promotes prefabrication processes. The moucharabiehs, headbands, double walls, facades of the base, are cast in the workshop then assembled on site.
The base of the building turns around from the railway tracks, welcoming the halls, setting the housing on the first levels away from the street, accompanying pedestrians on their way.
In the Amédée Saint-Germain district, COSA has also designed 39 housing units in relay houses and social residences and is leading the restructuring of a 19th century hall into an urban cellar and public mineral square.