Landscape monument

1996
30 km from Paris, Saint-Ouen l’Aumône is part of the Cergy Pontoise conurbation. The locality, which in 30 years has grown from a small rural town into a midsize conurbation with a 400 hectare industrial zone, is France's largest concentration of small firms and industries.
Chennevières, in the south of the town, is a large area of social housing bordered by two expressways. The objective was to regenerate a 3 hectare retail and service complex, construct a number of buildings and open up the district.
To bridge the gap in usage and the indeterminacy of the void produced by the large set of structures, the project provides a system for generating identities, a hierarchy of voids, a diversity in the relation to the land. "Tables" create a kind of urban enclosure, surrounded by brick frames 3 m wide and of variable height, which contain passageways and service strips (staircase, lifts) for the future buildings and facilities. "Terraces" give form to a plot-like structure, through networks of walls and passages, over an indeterminate zone making up car parks, gardens and play areas.

1998-2001
The Saint-Ouen l’Aumône town council did not follow up the scheme, since they considered the prize-winning project incompatible with the town plan.
The city of Grenoble was intrigued by this new use of land and commissioned the team to conduct an urban study laying down the bases of a mixed programme of housing and activities on the Neyrpic site, on the outskirts of the town. Inserted between two large breaks in the urban fabric (Cours de la Libération and railway lines), the site was occupied by 1960s housing, service activities and isolated sports grounds. It required a consideration of boundaries, a redefinition of land use and of the status of public and private spaces.
In 1999, in order to establish the basis of a scheme, the team conducted a general study of the zone consistent with the original competition territorial analysis, involving a distinction between different types of land division: boundaries, borders and edges.
A mixed programme was established: rental and privately owned housing, an activities building and a public garden.

2001-2005
The team was commissioned to design 45 housing units housing for accession to ownership + 2 individual houses, 25 social housing units, an activity space of 2000m2 and a green area.
Housing units and the activity building are organised around a green crossing and unifying area.
It is question here to enhance the permeability of an area considered as closed and to qualify areas and places by their limits and by a work on built relief: to emphasize crossing spaces, to intensify boundaries between private, common, collective or public territories.
Housing were the subject of a HQE process that focused for the 25 social housing units on the structure and the envelope of the building. The interior organisation of the rooms of lives frames the distant views on the mountains.