1984, Montpellier, France
A complex of 288 apartments which together compose a plaza with shops at street level. The plan of the plaza, an archetypal form in classical architecture, distributes the apartments in three semicircle, four corners and an entrance gateway to the plaza. The semicircles are made up of square 12 (40’) x 12 (40’) m modules laid out according to the geometry of a decagon. These modules, with ground and six upper floors, have two apartments on each floor. The vertical circulation has been handled in a similar fashion to the Théâtre in Marne-la-Vallée, with the emergency stairs inside a column and a triangular module containing the lift, the waste collector and one room of the apartments. The curve here is more closed than in Montpellier, with the result that the vertical circulation module is situated nearer the centre of the plaza, creating an exterior effect of individual houses and, by contrast, a completely continuous interior façade. A special typology was adopted for the apartments on the corners and in the gateway building.
