Project: Panache
Architects: Maison Edouard Francois
Location: Grenoble, France
Area: 50,924 sf (net floor area)
Photographs by: Luc Boegly and Sergio Grazia
The southeastern French city of Grenoble has welcomed an exciting addition to its architecture from the French studio Maison Edouard Francois.
Panache is a 165 feet tall apartment tower that consists of 50 apartments composed in the form of a pineapple.
The building’s innovative design concept features of 11 levels of apartments followed by 6 levels of terraces, stacked in an inverted way where the lowest floor owns the highest terrace.
A dual ecological and social equation
The challenge in this project was its height and the desire to go further in experimenting with energy performance, while offering occupants an outdoor surface area. The question thermal bridges excluding from the outset a balcony solution, what could be done to ensure occupants would have a rapport with the exterior, for which they had legitimate expectations in an apartment in this city of such extremes of temperature in winter and summer? An additional objectives, how could the distinction between noble floors versus inferior floors be achieved?
Separating the “balcony” function from the “dwelling” function seemed like an imperative, along with the stacking of the terraces on several levels on the roof, forming a sort of “green cloud”. Furthermore, these 35-m² spaces add another area in full sunlight, reached by an elevator, equipped with a summer kitchen and sanitary facilities allowing for a certain level of autonomy in relation to the main part of the apartment.
When the heat of the summer becomes stifling, these balconies will enable occupants to breath and dialog as equals with the Belledonne mountain chain. The green cloud is thus a new outdoor and quite out of the ordinary space that will be sold as an independent lot as a sort of second home. Below, each apartment has a double orientation, with living rooms positioned at the corners with broad floor to ceiling windows.
-Project description and images provided by Maison Edouard Francois
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