The 16th arrondissement is characterised by grandeur: boulevards, buildings and apartments are all imposing and generous. The project is set up to add this kind of generosity to the brief, which asks for the construction of 350 apartments, all of very limited size. Without changing their actual size, the apartments are laid out in order to maximize their openness to the environment. To do so, the traditional Parisian perimeter block is replaced by an urban form which procures every apartment with a specific orientation and view.
The project doesn’t inscribe itself in the fabric of inner city Paris, but rather in the larger, metropolitan territory. The peculiar urban form is the direct outcome of this manipulation on the large scale: the form is not drawn as such, but is the result of the most optimal and opportunistic relation with the context, be it close (the park, the hippodrome) or far (the Bois de Boulogne, the hillside of Meudon and the inner city Paris with the Eiffel Tower, which is in parts of the building already visible from the second floor).
This strategy allows avoiding any kind of vis-à-vis, both with the neighbours as within the complex itself: As a result, the relation between the apartment and the metropolitan landscape is intimate and direct.