Minimhouse

Discipline : Architecture

Categories : Residential Building / Prefab Home : Platinum Winner

Far from dogma, this project is a plea for a measured, integrated, efficient, flexible, sustainable, affordable and socially responsible individual housing.

It is at the same time a unique command responding to specific contextual requirements, a serial work from a reduced catalogue of shared components allowing for variable sizes, and a habitat that can be aggregated into medium density ensembles.

The project confronts the dichotomy between ‘serial’ and \\\\\\’architect\\\\\\’s house\\\\\\’. It questions and confirms the potential of a normalised habitat resulting from a catalogue of standardised and shared components. Their assemblage allows for the creation of variable size constructions that meet the needs of diversified groups of individuals.

Focused on the essential, minimalist and parsimonious, this project reflects on property, individual housing, its planning, its construction, its evolution, its impact on the land and the current ways of considering them.

The project aims to be a form of contemporary vernacular architecture. A purity of habitat through its modesty of expression, it draws its form from the archetypal atavistic house, the parallelepipedal volume with a gable roof, contextualised by the use of wood and the combined shutters typical of local tobacco sheds.

The sobriety of the plan, the rationalisation and the voluntary reduction of the technical generate its use value, its variability, its flexibility, its domesticity and its economy. The basic work, structured by a single inner core of services, is equipped and enriched progressively according to needs and means.

This formal and open spatial triviality, claimed as virtuous, associated with the development of a model of organic occupation of a territory enriched with infrastructures and public spaces, allows a density of land on a human and sustainable scale as well as an economy of construction.

On a per square metre basis, this structure, which can be completed in 35 days, requires less grey energy than a Minergie ECO collective housing complex. This low environmental impact makes it a viable, sustainable and alternative mode of design, construction and urbanisation, complementary to large urban complexes.

Considered as a counter-project of individual architecture based on the assembly of pre-defined components (255 pieces), this work reveals the versatile character of serial construction and aggregation. Through its architectural, energetic, environmental and social efficiency, it postulates that the patrimonial model of individual housing is not dogmatically revocable, and that it can participate in a sustainable society that favours constructive and land parsimony, the local economy, the return to the soil and the development of social links.

The project in images