Rue Pelleport apartments

Perched halfway up Rue Pelleport, at the crossroads of a cluster of adjacent streets, this small apartment building immediately surprises the onlooker by its formal and chromatic busyness. This abundance, which here indicates a generosity that the approach to the building does not belie, responds to the very keen attention that Frédéric Borel has paid both to the organization of the housing units and to the setting in which this project stands–the heterogeneous context of a neighbourhood with lively topography and disparate constructions. The project brings together volumes and parts of coloured planes into a concretion whose unusual outer cladding becomes a surface of exchanges with the features adjacent to the building : a 17-floor highrise tower, scattered buildings of old Ménilmontant and those of Rue Pelleport, all forming a homogeneous corridor. Frédéric Borel thus, and to the contrary, puts back together a unit and a mass which are both independent and binding : a building intentionally designed as a moment of incorporation and openness, like an urban event.