Tribune. The Minister in charge of housing, Emmanuelle Wargon, did not imagine the outcry that would provoke her statements on the sprawl of the building, calling it “Ecological, economic and social nonsense” “the model of the pavilion with garden (…), urbanization model which depends on the car ”. In response, the French Building Federation denounced “The persistent stigmatization of individual housing, contrary to the aspirations of the French”.
A century ago, more than half of the French were peasants; today, most of them are urban and even those who make a living from agriculture have adopted, with the help of television, urban lifestyles. And in a century, the French population has increased by nearly thirty million people. The violence of this mutation and its consequences on the imagination and behavior of our contemporaries are poorly measured. A house of your own, “the fruit of labor and savings,” was one of the Popular Front’s slogans. The pavilion, a favorite object, responds to this dissatisfaction.
That housing is individual, individualized, individualizable, and not an endless repetition of the same, is obvious.
What is expressed in the dream of a house is the demand for a possible freedom, a DIY from home, an outdoor space. Grouped individual housing as well as collective housing must meet these wishes. This requires architectures that borrow from the archetypes of these two traditions and implement them in a continuum of forms and volumes that go from townhouses to urban buildings.
Expired projects
Recently, François Leclercq [architecte et urbaniste] and Laurent Girometti [directeur de l’établissement public d’aménagement EpaMarne] gave Emmanuelle Wargon a report on housing and what it should provide. The confinement had brought to light the inadequacies of many homes, deprived of practicable exterior spaces, interior surfaces capable of offering everyone at the same time the privacy of a room to oneself and the spaces of common life, and paid new attention to bathrooms and kitchens, taking in the light through windows.
Today, are we going to bring projects that are already out of date to the market? “A beautiful three-room apartment of 57 m²”, promotional brochures say, “With a view to the future”, they add, while the study by François Leclercq proves that, below 62 m², without counting the necessary exterior surface, it is difficult to design a comfortable three-room apartment. These five square meters require no additional doors, no more elevators, no windows, no sinks or showers, only five square meters of floor and floor, and the same to paint on the ceiling.
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