AMI “Committed to the Future of Quality Housing”
Gradignan
The development of a modular wood construction system that is flexible, high-performance, and sustainable.
This project seeks to improve the quality of serial housing and its suitability for current and future lifestyles by developing a flexible and scalable prefabricated timber construction system. It is based on an MESR approach, which stands for modular, extendable, scalable, and reconfigurable. The first part of this project will concern the design of a stable of components (panels, posts, beams, floors, walls, etc.) and assemblies for new constructions and refurbishments. A BIM tool will support this construction system. This will facilitate the exploration of associations in relation to various constraints and the monitoring of the elements over time (digital passports and twins for the materials). The targeted application for this construction system will be a student housing complex in Gradignan, for which additional building heights will be developed.
The Existing Site
The experimental area is the campus of the National Agronomy Science School in Bordeaux (BSA), located within the Talence-Pessac-Gradignan university complex. The project concerns the three sets of student housing complexes: three apartment blocks built in the 1960s, two small blocks built in the 1990s, and an archipelago of small, standalone buildings.
The “kit-of-parts” will be tested in a specific case: raising the height of the BSA student housing as a way to mitigate their aging, stagnant architecture. When combined in different ways, the components will create various room typologies and amenities that are more in tune with current expectations and better able to evolve over time.
“Imago” is a prototype of 6 rooms that will be built for one of the BSA structures in partnership with the University of Bordeaux. The construction will allow for the testing of construction techniques and the monitoring of energy performance on a daily basis through measuring instruments installed on the additional building heights.