A Site in Transition

Located at the intersection of Avenue de Rochester and Rue Ropartz, the site opens onto a large garden; it offers the opportunity to rethink the transition between the avenue and the landscape. The project draws on this interface condition to create a generous connection between the built form and the ground. The ground floor, largely open, accommodates passages, lobbies, and shared rooms; it allows the city to breathe. Housing then rises in two north–south-oriented volumes whose massing alternates from one level to the next: a three- to four-story base forming the urban footing, surmounted by ten-story towers emerging above the canopy. Between these two regimes — the horizontality of the base and the verticality of the emergences — a gentle continuity takes shape, where the project’s layers respond to one another.

Each façade is conceived as a situated architectural expression. On the street side, it asserts itself, rigorous and understated, marking the city edge with light-toned concrete and fine detailing; on the garden side, it softens, multiplies openings and loggias, and extends the interiors through intermediate spaces. This gradation of attitudes reflects the diversity of ways of living: inhabiting the street, inhabiting the treetops, inhabiting the horizon.

Layers, Passages, and Setbacks

The housing is organized around the principle of passage: passing light through, passing air through. The layouts encourage dual orientation, natural ventilation, and framed views toward the landscape. On every level, each dwelling opens onto a balcony, terrace, or loggia, creating an inhabited extension of the threshold. On the ground floor, dwellings benefit from private gardens sheltered by low hedges; in the upper levels, the loggias are carved as recesses within the mass, filtering light and ensuring privacy.

The constructive language is based on a layered logic: a low-carbon concrete base — dense and porous — anchoring the building to the ground; intermediate levels in lightweight concrete structure, where the façade acts as a thermal screen; and more aerial upper tiers combining hybrid structure with timber-frame infill. This constructive gradation responds to exposure conditions: robustness below, lightness above.

Landscape Sobriety

Materials are selected for their contextual relevance: fine clay-toned renders, vertical timber cladding in alcoves, and fluted concrete on solid portions. The building thus reads as an inhabited section: matter expresses the depth of the place rather than a formal signature.

The landscape, designed with Taktyk, complements this vertical composition with a calm horizontality. Private gardens, shared gardens, and planted courtyards interweave into a continuous vegetated fabric where existing trees are preserved. Pedestrian pathways slip between the volumes, opening views and breathing spaces all the way to the Odette de Puigaudeau promenade. The ground becomes the primary foundation of the project: permeable, inhabited, and conducive to dialogue between residents and the living world.

Ultimately, this architecture seeks not to impose itself but to attune itself — to Rennes’ light, to the park’s trees, to the rhythms of daily life. It embodies a form of sobriety — not an economy of gesture, but a balanced equilibrium of comfort, compactness, and measured design.

To inhabit Maurepas here is to rediscover the pleasure of a cross-ventilated home, an opening to the sky, and a closeness to the ground. A gentle, measured way of living at height.