Natura Housing Units / Betillon & Freyermuth Architects

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Text description provided by the architects.In 2017, when we were contacted for our first housing competition, we responded positively, though with many preconceptions about real estate development and its architectural quality. We believed we could do better than others. The reality check was painful. We found ourselves overwhelmed by the constraints, norms, regulations, and economics of such projects. It took us a while to digest this failure, swallow our pride, and get back to work with much more humility.It is thanks to the wood company’s expertise and analytical skills that we decided to use these prefabricated wooden frame walls as formwork elements. This technique brings significant time savings on the construction site and considerable precision in construction. The structural contractor and the wood carpenter had to adapt their techniques to work together seamlessly. Like the Architects/Developer duo, a virtuous dynamic was born from these two trades. Highlighting our innovative approach, the continuous balconies total 2.5 km in length, outdistancing the span between Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.As far as we knew, a housing project of this scale (104 units) using straw insulation had never been done in France before. For a project of this size, 5700 bales of straw were required, meeting specific criteria: density, humidity, quality, and especially proximity of production to minimize the carbon footprint. Choosing straw also influenced the construction method. We decided to use prefabricated wooden frame walls. Each element composing these walls (from the insulation to the different materials) were sourced and crafted within 200 km of the site.In 2019, Premium Promotion invited us to participate in a competition inToulousefor a project involving 100 biosourced and geosourced housing units. Although this topic and these construction methods are relatively common nowadays, five years ago, they were innovative. Both our operator and we were complete novices in this field. We had to set aside our egos and humbly embrace these new practices and construction techniques. We then won the competition together, learned together, doubted together, made mistakes together, and succeeded together.