Fondation Le Castel
The new nursing home is located in an area of collective housing, dating mainly from the 1970s: a very heterogeneous fabric composed mostly of compact volumes, with an average height of 13 m. These generate a peri-urban public space, with no shops or alignments, bounded either by a hedge or by private car parks.
In this context, the park is a necessary breathing space for the neighbourhood, but also at the scale of the city, which offers few public green spaces of this size. It is intended to be strongly planted, open, public and connected, thus presenting itself on all the streets bordering it: Rue de Proz-Fontana, Rue des Artifices, but also Rue du Castel.
The building sits within this park. Through its form, however, it does not seek to impose itself as the main figure, but rather to compose with the park. It thus presents to the street its gables, slightly set back, whose proportions resemble those of the surrounding buildings; its pleated form, off-axis on the park side, generates several planes that reduce its visual impact; finally, its setting, with a ground-floor level slightly below the street, makes it possible both to reduce the height of the edifice and to make the residents' relationship with the garden more intimate.
The articulation of the façades conveys the image of a small residential building. Without asserting a base or a crowning element, the building is placed in the park without hierarchy of functions, first highlighting the unit of the room through a sensitive interplay of horizontals in precast concrete and verticals in ceramic.
The building's three-branched form creates three sub-spaces in the park, each maintaining a relationship with a specific element of the nursing-home programme. To the south, the establishment's public cafeteria and the main entrance open onto the large public park.
To the east, the green pocket is smaller. More discreet, but visually connected to the city, this space houses the residents' main dining room. Finally, to the west, the residents' library and rest area opens onto a smaller, dense and intimate garden, close to the irrigation channel, also hosting the therapeutic garden.
On the upper floors, this same form makes it possible to efficiently serve three distinct and autonomous units, where every room has a view of the park. The centre brings together the shared activities, such as the dining rooms, family rooms, head-nurse offices and nurses' rooms, as well as all the services needed for the organisation of nursing-home life. At the extremities are the unit lounges, more intimate, extended outdoors by a loggia.