The great landscape

The creation of an emergent element is an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the new neighborhood and the surrounding landscape. Because of its status, size and the culture, the quarter is a unique area within Bordeaux. The site is emblematic of the changes that have transformed our industrial cities, of paradigm shifts that have enabled the implementation of a highly complex urban strategy, taking into account the needs of a postmodern society.

The geography of Bordeaux is characterized by its flatness upon which is inscribed a dense and low urban fabric. This panorama is punctuated occasionally by taller buildings and bridges on the quay: some, like the arrow of Saint-Michel, have visual authority within the landscape. These punctuations seem to pierce the sky to permit a broad, yet organized reading of the skyline.

Our project was designed with the desire to escape formal fatalities related to the height, in order to develop an expanded notion of landscape from which we can see and be seen from afar. Consequently, the massing had to be delicate, evanescent. Our building belongs at once to the city and the sky.

The project is compact, light, dense and slender, rational and complex. For residents living above the Bordeaux skyline, living up high is to inhabit the landscape, it is to have a privileged relationship with one’s environment, to live at once in the city and the countryside.