La Métropolitaine
European Collective Housing Award. Winner
La Métropolitaine takes on one of the more thankless tasks in urban housing: giving form to a place that had none. Positioned along Avenue de la Porte de Clichy, at the threshold between Paris and its suburbs, the building establishes a strong, continuous frontage that faces the new Palais de Justice and begins to organise an urban space that had previously resisted definition.
The massing is compact and assertive from a distance. Up close, it dissolves into something more varied. A vocabulary of elongated fissures, luminous porches and irregular cuts articulates the façade, creating a porous and permeable organisation that animates the street-level experience. High breaks sequence the urban silhouette, decomposing it according to the proportions of the different programmes stacked within. Low breaks open genuine transparencies at street level, connecting the building’s interior life to the movement of the city around it.
The building’s limited depth, rather than a constraint, becomes the project’s defining typological move. Every apartment — from one-bedroom to five-bedroom — is designed as a through-plan, with the living room and kitchen organised along the full depth of the building. Each dwelling has two exterior extensions and two contrasting atmospheres: city on one side, garden on the other.
On the southern, street-facing side, the extension opens onto a loggia set behind a double skin. This generous intermediate space acts as a protective filter between the living areas and the noise, pollution and intensity of the avenue below. On the northern side, a private terrace forms part of the access sequence — a quieter, more sheltered extension that looks towards the park.
The result is a building that holds the city together at the scale of the street while offering every resident a private relationship with both urban life and green space. The dual orientation is not a luxury — it is the organisational logic from which everything else follows.
