ATELIER MARTEL

Description

The project is conceived within the logic of the garden apartment block, characteristic of the transformation of urban fringes, where a «rurban» way of life reconciles density with residential quality. The building allows for a dense use of the site while individualising collective housing through stacked duplexes. It is part of the «Étoile» urban development project in Annemasse, which is exemplary of the broader transformation of the Greater Geneva area, in which new cross-border urban centres are emerging. Within this context, the intervention by artist Hugo Deverchère engages architecture through its own materiality. The geological reference is not metaphorical: it introduces depth and a thickness of time that shifts the perception of the constructed object. The subsoil of Annemasse and the Lake Geneva basin – composed of glacial deposits, molasse and flysch – was the operative context for the project. What is buried and invisible informs the surface. The façade is developed through a process in which concrete is treated as an active material. Collaboration with a specialised laboratory opened up the project to experimentation. Granulometry, pigmentation and porosity produced variations and partially unpredictable effects. The façade is a field of relations where materials generate local differentiations. Accepting indeterminacy and ageing as constitutive dimensions, the project inscribes architecture within the long timescale of the territory and its geological depth.