BNR architects

ITINERARY

The BNR Agency won the 1994 EUROPAN 3 competition, “At home in the city”, on the Sainte site in France. Formed in 1994 from a partnership between 3 architects and urban designers – Thibaud Babled, Armand Nouvet and Marc Reynaud – BNR has grown around two mutually reinforcing geographical bases: Saint-Etienne and Paris.
Starting out from a position of questioning the limitations of housing models inherited from a century of unprecedented urban development, the Agency seeks responses that can renew the terms of a debate in which the link between the individual and shared meaning, between privacy and public space, requires us to look for new models of density and concentration that can convey shared landscape values. New typologies, strategies of density that take account of regional management issues, a multiple interweaving of nature and artefact, diversity in the ways that built structure and host landscape interrelate, new connections between uses – all these are key tools deployed by the Agency in different consultations and construction projects.
The three partners currently teach in the architecture schools of Nancy, Paris La Villette and Saint-Etienne.

NATURE

Thinking about the balances between artefacts (structures, the city, its developments) and nature. Facing the risks, the wear that natural forces impose on us, suggests new balances of power, where natural impulses can no longer simply kowtow to artificial imperatives. What fluctuations should we accept in the design of our projects? What new balances between artifice and nature should we consider to define a possible urban climax?

Saintes (F) - Following the river

To create a new town centre that reconciles and unifies the two banks of the Charente around a large development, to highlight a new dimension of the town and of its connection with nature.
To reveal the great landscape of the Charente in concentrated form, where the rise and fall are expressed in variations in the square's very dimensions, in the succession of plant types and in the several variations of the new floating bridge.

AMBIVALENCE

Architecture is a multiple system, which manufactures shelter but also delineates the adjacent spaces with new boundaries, made up of chosen materials, judicial porosities. Connecting several scales of space and use requires the expression of several construction timelines. What expression should be proposed for the construction of public or communal space? How do we reflect the different construction times of a site, layerings which – without mutual exclusion – give it shape?

Fleury Mérogis (F) - Between inside and outside

The three family accommodation buildings are transitional spaces between the confined world of the prison and the freedom of the outside world.
Each of the three sequences is built as a "threshold". A parvis-building that resembles a micro-landscape uniting the parvis and the building; The land outside, which borders the building, establishing a total continuity of material with the vertical walls up to the roof.

TERRITORIAL MATRIX

The influence that territorial structuring, with its specific patterns and measures, its transformation processes and its margins of change, can or even should have on the configuration of a fragment. How should such a fragment be embedded into the wider continuity of a region? What values should be assigned to the continuities afforded by the layout of a plot, the direction of a line?

Montreuil (F) - Housing in strips

Near the Murs à Pêches site, area that still bears the traces of original agrarian use, the project is part of a landscape of low-density detached housing, characterised by plots that are narrow but deep.
Most of the big dwellings are placed on the land near the pre-existing plot division system, with breathing space provided by inward looking private gardens, inserted into a system of foundation walls that establishes the boundaries of the interlacing pattern of spaces outside the project.

GRADUATED CONTROL

In order that projects should fit organically into their surrounding space, it is crucial that they should not be self-enclosed, either in their expression or in their delimitation. What graduation should be introduced into the traditional comprehensive control of the project? How do we invite other players, to contribute to the complex expression of a hybrid project reality?

Quarrata (I) - Temporalities

This layout precedes by topological gradations, infiltrating the spaces by successive, hierarchical landscape entities: from the precise definition of a highly localised set of predefined features through to the relative freedom of structures distributed in time and space as dictated by operational opportunities.
The resulting landscapes are both similar and always different, responding to contact with the "already-there", active palimpsests between town and nature.

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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