Located at the heart of the Messageries project, on a balcony overlooking the railway landscape of the Gare de Lyon, the L3 and L4 buildings form a link between the district and the central garden. The volume of the two buildings is designed to provide as much open green space as possible by bending the facades on either side of the lateral openings. This arrangement allows natural light to penetrate deeper into the heart of the garden and amplifies the openness of the tree-lined courtyards to the central garden sequence. The project is anchored in the Messageries district by a number of organisational features on the ground floor: generous access from the garden, an open-ground courtyard planted with trees, naturally lit communal rooms (for bicycles and household waste) and a through hall between the heart of the block and rue Charles Bossut.

The heart of the block between the two buildings is heavily planted and, with its pool, acts as an island of freshness. Communal spaces are vectors for personal development, generating social relationships and promoting balanced development between people and their environment. Our ambition is to define “spaces to create bonds”, to offer convivial spaces on the scale of the building, to offer a common scale, a neighbourhood relationship. Four spaces in particular have been designed: the evolving room, the plant library, the bicycle rooms and the shared roof.

The architecture of use is reflected in the desire to offer generous, flexible homes with high value for use, built with durable materials that respect their health. With walk-through or double-facing windows, natural ventilation, systematic outdoor extensions and optimised room layouts, the homes offer high-quality, adaptable lifestyles. They offer a privileged relationship with the natural elements: air, water, light and vegetation. For example, all homes from T3 upwards are either through- or double-facing, with generous outdoor spaces. In particular, the walk-through homes can be arranged flexibly: bedrooms on the street side and living room and kitchen on the centre of the block, or living room and kitchen on the street side and bedrooms on the centre of the block.

The project is part of a multi-disciplinary low-carbon approach, with a particular focus on low-carbon construction. This begins with the use of concrete only where it is needed or most useful. The load-bearing facades in solid stone create a park-side facade with a filigree, self-supporting exoskeleton that extends the interior outwards through winter gardens. Wooden floors run between the central part and the facade. This constructive honesty through the use of a load-bearing structure on the facade expresses rigour and a simple layout, and allows generous, ordered openings in a sober colour palette of ochre and beige tones. By making the resource (stone), the architecture and the uses coherent and interdependent, the project aims to collectively define the conditions for combining urban living, offering shared facilities and local services, with individual and family fulfilment in high-quality flats.