When it comes to green buildings, few architects today can touch Édouard François of Paris. in François' view, working with nature offers a welcome complexity: 'Watch a tree. It has a thousand branches, it moves, grows, changes colour!' He builds with what are known as green façades, much simpler than the current rage of living walls as they are planted in the ground and do not need elaborate watering systems. He broke into the big time with the Flower Tower, which was even simpler: pots on every balcony.
Sprout Building in Montpellier
One of his most spectacular buildings is this housing complex, where the walls are built like gabions, loose rocks enclosed by wire mesh, from which plants can grow. "The most radical aspect of the scheme is the treatment of the exterior as a massive rock face that will eventually bloom into a spectacular vertical garden."
Before: Eden Bio
A recent success is the completion of the architecture component of Eden Bio, where I wrote:
Social housing can be pretty depressing in les banlieues around Paris, and since the 2005 riots architects and planners have been looking for ways to improve them. Edouard François, known for his living buildings with green façades, is working on Eden Bio, featuring 100 terraced units set within dense organic gardens, with stairways enclosed in greenery.
After: Eden Bio
But François not only has to wait to get his buildings approved and built, he has to then wait until they actually grow in; not projects for those with short attention spans. He says:
The choice of plants was based entirely on their capacity to live without any fertilizer or pesticides and preserve their bio characteristics in new landscape. In fact, some plants have insect-repellent qualities and others have leaves that become fertilizer in Autumn. A real urban wilderness, self-maintained. The resulting landscape will be unpredictable, made of wild species that spontaneously complete my selection.
The smell will be bio, the fruits too.
In earth of such quality, the plants will become trees and bushes very rapidly. At the age of three, my little plants will have the strength of the most mature ones I could plant today. In less than five years, the result will be spectacular and impossible to obtain without the extravagant soil quality we have here.
Les Almadies Club Med
When I was in Paris in June I visited Édouard François in his offices, on the ground floor of a social housing project in Montparnasse. It was modest, simple space, but so full of ideas and energy. One project he is working on is the rebuilding of a Club Med in Dakar, Senegal, where many of the rooms are like birds' nests; Hannah Bergqvist described them in Planet Magazine:
The 250 rooms – made of clay, wheat and wood – are perhaps best described as wooden bird’s nests, or cocoons, as they rest above ground elevated by poles. The location of the resort is stunning with the North Atlantic Ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. To provide the guests with a full view each of the rooms have 360-degree windows.
"In our daily life we normally only have windows facing one way, maybe two, but never all the way round. A 360-degree view means that you are free", he says.
More: Hannah Bergqvist
Les Almadies Club Med
An overall perspective
Les Almadies Club Med
"With this place I want to do something that is very poetic and unusual and that also deals with ecology. We have a very high level of ecological ambition for the project and are aiming to become self-sufficient."
Les Almadies Club Med
"To achieve sustainability François has been employing green initiatives including solar energy and the use of cold water from the North Atlantic to serve as both the cooling for the swimming pool and air conditioning for the hotel restaurant."
Redevelopment of Almadies Point
While in Francois's office, I got up close and personal with his model of his redevelopment proposal for the most westernmost point in Africa, a complex of hotels, restaurants and offices all wrapped in a living skin that will keep it cool and green. He describes it in more detail in the video at the end of this slide show.
More: B2B2SP
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