Maison de l’Écologie
ANMA’s first reuse construction project
At the end of a cul-de-sac in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, a standout project for the agency is taking shape: the transformation and retrofit of a former medical center into the “Maison de l’Écologie,” ANMA’s first project built through large-scale reuse.
Without altering either their structural frames or their external envelopes, three adjoining buildings are reconnected and reconfigured to create a new workspace. Organized around a paved yet cool courtyard—featuring a semi-permeable ground surface, generous planting, and a newly introduced tree—the project reveals a timber “utility cabin” perched above the courtyard and a glazed winter garden where daylight filters through large window openings.
Minimizing carbon footprint
This prototype project stems from a collective commitment between the design team and the client, engaging social-economy enterprises to meet ambitious targets: maximizing conservation of the existing fabric, reusing materials, deploying a replicable environmental strategy, enabling spatial adaptability, and fostering social inclusion.
Floors, partitions, insulation, finishes… from the primary structure to the second-fix elements, every detail is drawn and every constructive solution is devised to minimize the project’s carbon footprint: reuse of available resources, no soil sealing, full on-site storage, extensive prefabrication, reversible junctions, and a predominant use of bio-sourced materials.
From rubble to new flooring
This ambition requires a specific sequencing: construction begins before the design studies are fully completed in order to quantify salvageable materials and rubble. Through precise sourcing and rigorous material tracking undertaken by the agency, more than 50% of the site’s rubble is reused, while the remaining volume is transported to the local reuse platform Réavie.
Ten tonnes of rubble are sorted, stored, and crushed on site, then transformed—without washing, in order to avoid consuming large volumes of water purely for aesthetic purposes—into new finishes. Concrete blocks, bricks, and plaster linings from the former medical practice are repurposed into a plaster-based concrete applied to the floors and, for the walls, into a mortar with rendering qualities whose final appearance, largely unpredictable, is only revealed during the final sanding.
Walls and floors carrying stories
As with the floors, the project’s walls are composed of 100% reclaimed material, from their timber structure to the door handles. Partition walls are reversible, prefabricated at Réavie, and assembled on site. Brick partitions in the wet rooms are laid on site as part of a social-integration construction program. Exterior walls receive a timber-frame lining, wood-fiber insulation, and exposed Fermacell panels. And for only the second time in France, façades are insulated using halved straw bales inserted directly into the existing stonework and finished with a plaster render—without lime.
Both outside and inside, a fence—built during a participatory workshop—and a staircase are crafted from reclaimed structural timber and salvaged parquet flooring from the existing buildings. On the upper level, a new floor deck is composed of the slats of a reclaimed sports parquet from a former squash court in the Paris region. Below, existing tiles have been preserved, and all sanitary porcelain fixtures are reused, sourced either from the site or from Réavie. In the courtyard, the cobblestones have been dismantled, selected, brushed, and re-laid.
A methodology based on precision drawing
The working method inherent to reuse results in constant adjustment: what is drawn is not definitive until the available materials are confirmed. Contrary to the conventional prescriptive model, this approach guarantees neither quantity nor uniformity of materials. Constructive details are therefore executed according to the material opportunities offered by the local resource stream.
The Maison de l’Écologie stands as a manifesto for an alternative, meticulous form of construction: resource-efficient, low-energy, and nearly passive. It showcases the raw texture of materials and an openly expressed technicality - where nothing is concealed: neither services, nor screws, nor the inevitable irregularities of matter.
