Project: 3 Attached Houses
Architects: PONT12 architectes
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Area: 7,696 sf
Year: 2020
Photographs by: Matthieu Gafsou
3 Attached Houses by PONT12 architectes
PONT12 architectes is a Swiss studio which has designed the 3 Attached Houses project in a residential area overlooking Lausanne, Switzerland. It was built in place of a 1950s villa and the project aims to make maximum use of the plot’s potential, hence, ending up with just over 7,500 square feet of luxurious contemporary living spaces.
3 attached houses replace a villa from the 1950s in a residential area overlooking Lausanne. The project makes maximum use of the plots potential for densification while taking care, through its form and materiality, to fit into its suburban and green context.
Offsets in plan and cross-section reduce the scale and reinforce the domesticity of the complex. They create terraces that extend the living rooms and multiply the orientations, in particular a westward clearance for the house in the middle.
The plasticity of the volume and the composition of the facades are intriguing, blurring the traditional typological reading of three adjoining houses. The typological originality lies elsewhere: the project dispenses with the regulatory attic floor and distributes the maximum constructible surface area over two more generous levels in favor of a panoramic flat roof.
The materials are left raw and reduced to a minimum: exposed concrete on the inside, wood on the outside. The atmosphere and richness of the project are achieved through the assembly and treatment of these materials: concrete laid out walls, sanded slabs revealing aggregates, a carefully designed cladding on the façade that revisits the traditional vertical bardage.
These simple and radical choices also obeyed energy and constructive coherence: the active slabs transmit heat in an optimal way, the design of the bardage allowed the carpenter to prefabricate the entire façade and optimize the break on the building site.
