The hangar was placed alongside four others, at the edge of a straight line which runs through the Briard countryside, in the north of Seine-et-Marne. The first store hemp and its derivatives. From the latest addition comes the smell of sawdust and the percussion of a stapler. Men, exclusively for the moment, wearing helmets and gloves, take turns to construct, in dry conditions, the facades of buildings, schools and offices. The Aulnoy site is designed to produce 15,000 square meters of parts per year. “We should reach them this year”assures Arthur Cordelier, the director of this very young factory, Wall’Up prefa, which is already looking for a second site, this one not being expandable.
It is from the mezzanine overlooking the workshop that the sequence of gestures of the “operators” is best appreciated.. There are twelve of them, compared to two just a year ago. A first pair assembles the skeleton of the wall made up of wooden uprights and lintels. Boxes are enclosed. Everything is strapped, turned over like a pancake, and pushed to the back of the hall under the mixer, from which the house specialty, hempcrete, flows: a mixture of hemp, water and lime. Two masons are raking and compacting with a trowel. Then allow fifteen hours of setting in winter (eight in summer), finishing, a short month of drying vertically, before delivery to the construction sites.
If the genesis of the story differs, the dynamic is the same, in the south of the department, ten minutes from Montereau-Fault-Yonne. In Vestack premises, these are not not only facades, but entire pieces of floors which are prepared under the hall of a former plastics factory. The floor and walls are cut, insulated before men and women plaster, paint, draw the electrical and water networks, cover the facades, sometimes install a doorbell. The modules are then shipped, by truck, ideally within 200 kilometers. A 150 square meter crèche – three volumes, four weeks of work – should travel to Lille. But if the market takes off, as Sylvain Bogeat, the co-founder of the start-up, formerly of Unibail and Valérie Pécresse’s office when she was at Bercy, hopes, the distances should shorten.
This is because promises were made, Wednesday October 18, in the Récollets chapel, in Paris, at the Maison de l’architecture d’Ile-de-France. Like Arthur Cordelier from Wall’Up, Sylvain Bogeat made the trip. The morning was devoted to off-site construction, their specialty now, which consists of preparing construction elements in the factory before assembling them on site. An event with a welcome coffee, round tables, photos, and even the signing of a charter.
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