This notion of a whole as part for the part as whole, will be our entry point to design a “wall” contributing to the city. The re-assembly of the façade will allow us to reoccupy that what we have lost in architecture: space. Re-articulating flat assemblies towards porous space can extend the possibilities of the leftovers behind the curtains: in our case stacked mass housing ensembles. Strangely, most mass housing projects fail not because of the quality of the apartment’s arrangements, but by the lack of open space and shared facilities.
As a case study of mass housing, we will deal particularly with the “Grand Ensembles” in Paris. The Grand Ensembles, public housing projects in Paris and its suburbs, were built after World War II to accommodate an increasing population of rural migrants and immigrants. Today, those large concrete landscapes seem to be impossibly huge and virtually abandoned. These deteriorating buildings we will take as a starting point for a reactivating intervention. The re-imagination of lively neighborhoods goes here hand in hand with the technical upgrading of such building structures to self-sustainable environments. Therefore, as an ecological design, we seek for a city that turns into an architectural composition of humans and inhumans parts equally.