Le Nouveau Prieuré
Short description
Chêne-Bougeries, a pretty commune on the left bank, is experiencing, like all the agglomerations located on the outskirts of the city of Geneva, significant development. Today, between the Frontenex plateau and the Gradelle residential complex, 18,000 square meters are devoted exclusively to a bold and original program.
The project
The buildings are distinguished by a skilful implantation and carefully worked volumetrics. The approximate parallelism, the imperfect orthogonalities and the inflection of the facades bring a certain freshness to the whole. Without heaviness, the complex offers to the walker a perception of slenderness where the play of alignments allows pleasant visual escapes. At the heart of the project, the circular space brings together all the dynamics of the ensemble. A true "village square", it is here that the desired animation and social link are created.
The expression of the facades also contributes to this success. The repetitive pattern and the alternation of full and empty spaces obviously give a clear identity to the whole; the banalization is skilfully avoided by a treatment giving pride of place to warm colors and raw materials. The formal purity of this colored checkerboard hides a sharp implementation. The large hollow boxes in prefabricated concrete seem to be delicately placed in staggered rows one on top of the other, as if the buildings no longer had to respond to any static constraints or enslaving construction standards.
A very accomplished plastic effect that does not prevent the complex from reaching the standards of the Minergie® label. The project brings together three different large houses under a clearly recognizable common entity: that of an innovative institutional realization, perhaps one of the first in Switzerland to offer such a program. A new (small) neighborhood with a strong identity, the "New Priory" stands out in a rather traditional built environment.
Its well thought-out spatial and aesthetic characteristics nevertheless guarantee a smooth integration, without clashing with the existing fabric and without conflict with the landscape.