Samstag, 6. März | 14:30
Residence for Researchers | 25 Housing Units
Located on the southern edge of the Cité Universitaire’s majestic park, the “Maison Julie-Victoire Daubié” has the privilege of enriching one of the capital’s most beautiful collections of modern architecture. Unencumbered on its four sides, the residence is immediately identifiable as a “split and raised” cube, the organization of which is easily readable in its section. Above the reception areas located in the semi-buried garden level, the first floor of apartments is 2 m 90 above the ground level of the Cité Universitaire. The 106 apartments (1-bed to 3-beds) are distributed over seven levels. The total height of the building is 24.95 meters. The entrance areas are therefore covered and protected by the elegant underside of the housing block, entirely made of silky ribbed concrete.
On the eighth and last floor, the circulation area widens to form a large collective terrace, protected by transparent railings, while the top of the “East strip” houses a fitness room with a view of the city. These common facilities affirm the collective dimension of the building, as well as its spectacular relationship with its environment.
The structural efficiency, the absence of buildings opposite and the singularity of the context allow the facade to take the form of a majestic curtain wall (with high acoustic performance), however, far from a homogeneous glass surface. The scale of the housing unit remains readable by scanning the horizontal sashes, as well as in the background, in the set of full-height colored curtains.
More than a contemporary re-reading of the pavilion typology, this new residence becomes a stunning casket of glass and metal, promoting the paths and transparency between exterior and interior, park and building, privacy of the housing and kinetic spectacle of the périphérique ring road. During the day, its glass facades grant it a certain majesty. At night, the lights of the apartments turn the building into a lantern. By day and by night, here is a new signal of contemporaneity at the Cité Universitaire.
BRUTHER
Founded in 2007 in Paris by Stéphanie Bru and Alexandre Theriot, BRUTHER works in the fields of architecture, research, teaching, urban planning and landscape. BRUTHER won the Swiss Architectural Award 2020, the Prix de l’Équerre d’argent 2020 for the Residence and Reversible car park in Palaiseau, in 2018 for the Julie Victoire Daubié residence, and in 2016 for the Maison de la Recherche et de l’Imagination in Caen, the Gold Award “Best Architects Awards” 2016 for the Centre Culturel et Sportif Saint-Blaise de Paris and was nominated in 2015 for the Mies van der Rohe Award for the Centre Culturel et Sportif Saint-Blaise de Paris. Stéphanie Bru and Alexandre Theriot have held numerous international conferences and taught as guest professors in several European schools of architecture. Alexandre Theriot has been appointed professor at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Residence for Researchers, Paris, 2018
Foto: Maxime Delvaux