Construction of MVRDV’s Ilot Queyries, a courtyard apartment building located in the French port city of Bordeaux, has been completed.
The project is situated across from the city’s UNESCO World Heritage historic center. It is the largest building in a development of four buildings master-planned by MVRDV and Joubert Architecture.
Co-designed by local architects Flint, Ilot Queyries features 282 homes, including 128 for social housing, along with parking, commercial space, a rooftop restaurant, and a large collective green space.
The building was envisaged to embody the principles of the neighboring MVRDV-designed Bastide-Niel masterplan, which combines the intimacy, surprise, and liveliness of Bordeaux’s UNESCO World Heritage historic city with the density, ecology, light, and comfort of the modern city.
Per the architects, “Ilot Queyries thus adopts the same approach as the Bastide-Niel masterplan: the building fills the site to its boundaries, lending an intimate feeling to the streetscape, while the roofs are arranged into carefully calibrated slopes to provide maximum ventilation, daylight, and sun to the building itself and to its neighbors.”
This yielded a nearly 200-meter-long, irregularly shaped courtyard building that frames the 5,200-square-meter courtyard.
“The building responds to its surroundings on all sides: on the south-eastern end of the building, sections as low as one storey relate to the low-rise neighbours, while on the north-east, facing the river, it rises as high as nine storeys. At this high point, a glass crown houses a restaurant with views of the river and the historic centre of Bordeaux beyond.”
The façades facing the street are lower than those facing the central courtyard. In addition, the roof slopes vary between 14 and 45 degrees depending on their relation to the sun, which creates complex and varied interior spaces. The street-facing façades feature a muted, cream-colored palette with the courtyard-facing façades embellished in a bright, red textured stucco.
“The Covid-19 pandemic showed everyone how valuable outdoor spaces close to their homes can be, and I hope Ilot Queyries can show that such amenities don’t require compromise”, says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “The building creates close and intimate streets without ugly parked cars thanks to its ample car parking. At the same time every apartment is provided a balcony or loggia, while the green park space becomes a wonderful community amenity.”
6 Comments
Some plans and sections would be great to better understand the apartment layouts!
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I love how architects put digital happy people into their digital concrete public spaces to make them look less bleak.
how can you tell those are happy people?
Awful, even worse than the promotional verbage: "the building fills the site to its boundaries, lending an intimate feeling to the streetscape".
Here in paradise farmland preserved under open space laws, intended to maintain some shred of the rural character that once existed here, are hedgerowed at the street to make private reserves for speculative development. This project reminds me of that.
I once helped design a house behind a potato field in just that situation. Same region, too.
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