When social action rhymes with bioclimatic architecture

Paris is not just a city in the grip of rampant gentrification, stretched between a center given over to the interests of luxury and a periphery dotted with "starchitect" towers . A semblance of virtue remains there, especially in the working-class neighborhoods, where social projects are still springing up here and there, the architecture of which is, in many ways, exemplary from an environmental point of view. Two recent deliveries deserve attention, which are hardly similar but nevertheless have a lot in common.

The largest, in terms of both surface area and program, is located in the ^19th arrondissement, near Place des Fêtes. Surrounded by a large pedestrian esplanade, open to the city, it brings together two public facilities: the Maison des réfugiés, a reception center whose mission is to support exiled people in their integration project, the management of which has been delegated to the Emmaüs and Singa associations, and the James-Baldwin media library.

We are on the site of the Jean-Quarré hotel school, a site whose history is linked to that of refugees, since it served as a shelter for several hundred of them in the mid-2010s (the school itself had closed in 2006), an episode which ended with a widely publicized evacuation, as part of a police operation. The new building does not offer accommodation, but it does offer these users, made vulnerable by existence, bright premises, whose beautiful atmosphere owes as much to the quality of the materials they are made of as to the generosity of the volumes, the outdoor spaces and the landscaping work (by the Mutabilis agency).

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