Category: France

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Déchelette Architecture: Quatre Cheminées

 

The project located in Boulogne-Billancourt in the Parisian suburbs, involves a building with eight social housing units, a caretaker’s lodge, and a shop on the ground floor, with a raw earth facade on the street side, a stone base and a wooden facade on the garden side. It is driven by a desire for restraint in design and the use of natural, bio-sourced, and local materials without ever losing sight of comfort for the occupants.

 

 

The building rises on five levels including a ground floor, four floors of housing and a green roof. It is structured around a central circulation core including an elevator and a staircase serving all levels. The search for optimization, transversality and independence of spaces guided our design.

The façade at street level is made of raw earth blocks, thus following the precepts of the “cradle to cradle” concept based on two principles: zero pollution and 100% reusability. The rammed earth used in the project comes from local sources, specifically from the excavation of the Greater Paris metro. This reduces carbon emissions from transportation and follows the circular economy principle.

 

 

 

Rammed earth bricks are prefabricated , differing from the traditional on-site method. This technique speeds up construction and ensures consistency and quality control, and  offers flexible installation in complex urban settings. Rammed earth bricks are placed on a stone base ensures both structural integrity and environmental sustainability.

Location: Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Completion: 2023

Project Area: 350 m2

Budget: €1,700,000 excluding VAT

Architect(s): Déchelette Architecture

REFERENCES

https://www.dechelette-architecture.com/quatre-cheminees/

https://europe40under40.com/project/17-rue-des-4-cheminees-2023-emmanuelle-dechelette-boulogne-billancourt-france/

https://www.boulognebillancourt.com/information-transversale/actualites/le-plus-haut-batiment-en-beton-de-chanvre-a-ete-construit-rue-de-bellevue-2996

https://www.facebook.com/dechelettearchitecture/?locale=ms_MY

 

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FRANÇOIS COINTERAUX: THE ARCHITECT OF THE ‘AGRICULTURAL PROLETARIAT’

Frontispieces to Cointeraux’s École d’architecture rurale (second edition, 1793). Façade of a ‘house of a decorated rammed earth house’ and the ‘same house made from the hands of a worker’.

FRANÇOIS COINTERAUX: THE ARCHITECT OF THE ‘AGRICULTURAL PROLETARIAT’ is an essay by Anja Segmüller who writes on the history of the French Architect Francois Cointeraux who is known for his focused attention on “the possibilities of ‘pisé’ (rammed earth) as a construction technique and to teaching the agricultural working class how to construct their own cost-effective, fire-resistant, and ‘dignified’ dwellings, founding several educational institutions”.

Read the essay at Drawing Matter.

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FRANÇOIS COINTERAUX (1740-1830): PIONEER OF MODERN EARTHEN ARCHITECTURE

CALL FOR PAPERS
FRANÇOIS COINTERAUX (1740-1830), PIONEER OF MODERN EARTHEN ARCHITECTURE: Theory, Teaching and Dissemination of a Vernacular Technique, International Conference, Lyons, 10-12 May 2012

Organized by the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA, UMR-CNRS 5190) and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art

From 1785 onwards, the builder and master mason François Cointeraux actively promoted a construction technique of vernacular origin, known as pisé de terre (or ‘rammed earth’), which was at that time confined to southeast France. His cahiers or fascicules from the Ecole d’architecture rurale (School of Rural Architecture), published in Paris in 1790-91, were rapidly translated into seven languages (German, Russian, Danish, English, Finnish, Italian and Portuguese). They attracted the attention of major architects such as Henry Holland (1745-1806) in England, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in America, David Gilly (1748-1808) in Germany and Nicolaï L’vov (1751-1803) in Russia, founder of a flourishing school of earthen architecture in Tiukhili near Moscow, based on Cointeraux’s school of the Colisée in Paris. Through his publications, Cointeraux generated an almost universal interest for this material, as cheap as it was abundant, and encouraged its adaptation to rural or residential architecture.

This success can largely be explained by a desire to revive rural architecture, which was in perfect harmony with both the physiocrats’ line of thought and the actions of agricultural societies. However, Cointeraux never managed to popularise its use widely and lastingly in France. His numerous publications did not achieve their expected uptake with the institutions concerned. He is nonetheless representative of a culture of invention and innovation, highly characteristic of the first industrial revolution and the birth of modern architecture. The aim of the conference is to present a synthesis of the extensive research carried out on François Cointeraux over the course of the last twenty years and to re-situate his work in the wider context of the evolution of ideas and techniques.

Organization
Laurent Baridon, Université Lyon II, LARHRA (UMR 5190), Louis Cellauro, LARHRA, Jean-Philippe Garric, INHA / AUSSER, Gilbert Richaud, LARHRA Advisory board: Hubert Guillaud, Énsa de Grenoble / CRA-Terre, Miles Lewis, Faculty of Architecture, Melbourne University, Claude Mignot, Paris-IV / Centre André Chastel, Liliane Pérez-Hilaire, Centre d’Histoire des Techniques et de l’Environnement du CNAM, Antoine Picon, Harvard School of Design, LATTS

Submission procedures
Proposals (title, abstract of maximum one page, short CV) should be sent to the organizers at the following address: cointeraux.2012@orange.fr Or: Laurent Baridon, LARHRA, Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, 14 avenue Berthelot, F-69363 Lyon Cedex 07, France

The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2011. Results of the selection will be communicated to the authors one month later. The proceedings of the conference will be published in 2013.

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L’Association Nationale des Professionnels de la TERRE Crue

L’Association Nationale des Professionnels de la TERRE Crue fédère les acteurs et actrices de la construction en terre crue en France. Elle regroupe des artisans et des chefs d’entreprise, des producteurs de matériaux, des architectes, des ingénieurs, et des organismes de formation professionnelle. Elle accueille aussi des représentants d’organismes régionaux (parcs…) ou d’autres associations développant des activités dans le domaine de l’architecture de terre (valorisation des patrimoines nationaux, architecture contemporaine, recherche sur les matériaux et les techniques…).

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Node 1 and Contour Crafting

“Node 1” is a conceptual architecture project by French Architect François Roche which lacks most of the usual architectural accoutrements: blueprints, material suppliers, subcontractors. Instead, Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes. A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable – merely viable – made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe.

The closest thing to a viab today is a modest mud-working robot, called “contour crafter”, invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Two years ago, California-based architect Greg Lynn was talking to Khoshnevis about the same topic. [ 1 | 2 | 3 ]

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CRATerre

CRATerre-EAG, The Center for the Research and Application of Earth Architecture, is part of the School of Architecture of Grenoble, France, which offers the only Masters Degree in Earth Architecture in the world. The website is only in French, but you can translate at babelfish.