A new lease of life

摘要

Sitting on one of the lonely armchairs in the ground-floor reception, a woman catching her breath tells me 'I should have just said it was the building with the very large windows'. She is one of the first tenants to have moved in at Les Chataigniers, a new residence for older people situated on a street of the same name, but not yet added to the map of Eixheim. The ambulance drives past once before going around the block a second time. Between a terrain vague and the waste collection site of this sleepy suburb of Mulhouse, the shimmering facade looks more like a warehouse than a home for retired people. There are no windows as such - Lacaton & Vassal don't do windows - but the rhythm of the elevation is provided instead by steel poles and sheets of corrugated material, by wall-to-ceiling jambs and the frames of sliding glass doors, by the soft ripples of curtains and the slim balcony railing. Like sheet music, the building is held together by its structural rigour and rhythmic regularity, while being open and luminous. Its layered skin is translucent, offering glimpses of what happens inside, until the vertical streaks of corrugated polycarbonate sheets are replaced by the vertical streaks of corrugated aluminium sheets.