The Gardens of Gabriel

5+1AA architecture agency designed a housing complex near Paris, characterised by a varied decoration obtained through the use of one single material, ceramics.

After two years of work, 5+1AA architecture agency ends a housing complex of four buildings with a shop in Asnières-sur-Seine. The project is situated between the end and the beginning of an urban axis of fundamental importance for the whole city because of the forthcoming opening of a major train station for the Grand Paris Line. The trapezoidal shape of the area of the project is particularly evident in aerial images.

The programme consists of 144 affordable housing units and 39 social housing units going from R+1 to R+8, and includes 360 square metres of commercial space. The project’s composition of volumes is divided up into three buildings developed mainly along the length of the RER line C.

The project was developed thanks to an analysis of possibilities: the atmosphere, the landscape light, the environmental constraints and the formal game that consists in a series of cuttings, openings, slidings defininf the three bodies of the building. The city is in continuous dialog with the internal park, creating a building/landscape rhythm. The architectural writing of the project is based on this notion of rhythm (openings, materials, treatment of the top floors): it favors, in a common grammar, the diversity of the urban landscape created between city and nature.

The project is characterised by a reaffirmation of the decor with the use of ceramics and the ornamentation of the façades represented by six angels. This reaffirmation invites to reconsider housing as a home, a place to live, and not only an addition of requirements to satisfy.

Unity, urban rhythm, classical vertical stratification, a unique matter that integrates some shades able to foresee the soft metamorphosis towards the sky, where are the ancestors of the cities, observing us, looking towards the horizon, towards the sky. The decoration reappears in the city as a means of identity and pleasure, beauty and culture.