Project Description
Nature always managed to infiltrate architecture. It’s all about back and forth between what is true and false, opaque and legible, hidden and obvious. Nature is neither an ideologic nor aesthetic alibi that dresses up architecture. Modernity has split mankind from his surroundings. It’s necessary to recreate the links between man and his environment, where time is never frozen, where we make way for our dreams.
The relation between architecture and the city will give way to a new relation between architecture and nature: excessive urbanization of the greater part of the territory has become a vital issue and what is at stake is important; A new urban culture must be given the chance in which a new nature and human density are developed conjointly so that they responded to real human needs and values. Working within that framework architecture could minimize its impressive presence and finally think about its new relationship, and approximation to its environment.
The project of EKKO is built on a former industrial wasteland on the right bank of Bordeaux around the issue of climate change and to think of the city differently as a new inhabited landscape.
On a plot of land of 1800 m2, it offers fifty housing units in a built volume of 15000 m3 and it produces a shared outdoor space in three dimensions of 6635 m3.
This entire space is a large collective room planted on each of its five levels with floating trees. It belongs to everyone and each of the inhabitants manages a part of it as a work, eating, or general relaxation space.
It solves the question of density in the city and temporizes the climate, the light, the wind the sun, and the freshness of the air, so that people live well there. There are similarities with the cold greenhouse of Estufa Fia in Lisbon, Portugal.
More than a winter garden, it is a living place that adapts to the different times of the year and induces its qualities to the interior spaces of the dwellings, in an idea of companionship with nature that goes far beyond the strict question of landscape or the ideology of heritage, a sensual idea that adds to the demands of the visible the joy of the tactile, even the pleasure of scents.
We build with nature to reconnect man with his environment.