Paris Affordable Housing Challenge

'Monumental Housing' focuses on the fundamental structure of Hausmann-designed Paris: landmark 'places' meant to serve as the key organizational elements of the city. Here, 12 housing blocks are designed to be dispersed throughout the city as a new form of cultural monument. Each block is to house a collection of new apartments. These are clad in a perforated metal panel that replaces the human scale of the apartment with a unitless pattern that tends toward the sculptural. The blocks are limited in their connections to the ground, to allow space for open public parks below. The project is reminiscent of Bernard Tschumi's famed competition-winning entry for Paris' Park de La Villette in the mid 1980's, in its application of a standardized sculptural element across the space of the city - a means for visual orientation and placemaking. The proposal is quirky without being gimmicky, and the judges applaud its boldness.

According to the submission, titled "Urban Infill", it "mines the thousands of open spaces located throughout Paris in the shape of its urban courtyards to use as added affordable housing sites." The project identifies 1037 inter-block sites for the construction of nearly 2 million m² for residences. This corresponds to 81500 new micro-units that could house up to 135000 people in Paris. The massing of each site claims to respond to specific building distance, sunlight, and cross ventilation requirements. Both the urban analysis and the resulting building forms are enticing, and the back-yard lot construction is certainly aimed to be provocative. Whether the seductive crystalline forms represented in the drawings could be constructed affordably and profitably is another matter, likely requiring a further level of research. The project represents a well-thought response to the form and density of the typical Parisian block.

This project proposes a modified system of development for 9000 logement sociaux, or social housing sites. According to this system, property rights are to be partially transferred by a property owner to a 'social owner', or property management entity. As a method of oversight, the process requires city hall to meet with both the legal owner and the social owner prior to the architect's submission of design documents to the council for approval. Projects are to contain socially-oriented community spaces as well as a for-profit commercial space, as a means to long-term profits that would incentivize social management or investment. The jury was supportive of this project, which analyzes and re-thinks city-specific economic and political drivers of projects. The entry intelligently adapts the popular graphic style of Paris city maps. The result is playful, positive, and convincing.