The Village

illustrarch Editoral Team24 December 20191 Mins read413

The Village is a Paris housing proposal by AR2B architects with Sophie Ponthieu that reimagines the apartment block as a self-sustaining community in response to soaring property costs. According to the daily newspaper «Le Monde», which quotes a report by Parisian notaries dated 26 July 2019, the average price per square metre in Paris has crossed the symbolic line of €10,000. Faced with this new record, the proposal questions the functioning of our society and asks how a single building can begin to answer pressures that the wider city has failed to absorb.

The objective is to create a system that could be similar to the functioning of a village in order to respond to the social, economic and ecological problems that affect contemporary society. On the social level, the project integrates a multi-programmatic logic into the whole scheme in order to recreate a social network, with an organization operating at the level of the building and its local services. This idea of mixing uses within a single structure draws on long-standing thinking about mixed-use development, where homes, work and commerce share the same address rather than being separated across a city.

An economic engine inside the building

Economically, the scheme creates a model within the building based on the integration of a programmatic percentage including offices, shops and tourism, in order to meet the high speculative demand and offer a significant number of decent homes at an affordable price. This economic model makes it possible to find a balance between a viable programme and housing, creating a circular system for its financing. Such cross-subsidy strategies are familiar in debates around affordable housing, where revenue-generating floors help carry the cost of homes that the market alone would price out of reach.

Ecologically, the creation of a social fabric with local and circular functioning brings many advantages, such as the sharing of services, waste management and the development of new types of public transport. Read against the housing pressures of Paris, The Village reads less as a single tower and more as a small piece of city, arguing that density and community need not be opposites. It is a proposition that treats the building as an instrument of solidarity, where the way people live together is designed with the same care as the structure that shelters them.