(F) What architectural complex, these days, would propose a "concrete" utopia in the area of social housing? These were the terms of the competition which AIR and P+L Architects entered with their Citadium project. Laetitia Perrin and Mathieu Lesavre, who set up their agency in Paris in 1998, and Cyrille Hanappe who set up AIR in 2000, here propose replacing the idea of collectiveness with the idea of community, thereby offering a critical line of thinking, under the protective aegis of J.-B. Godin, designer of the Familistère de Guise, near to which the project located. The competition stipulated imagining a complex of 60 to 100 "intermediate"-type housing units (combining collective housing and individual housing features). Citadium thus proposes an open and vertically stratified programmatic loop, installed between two levels--a mineral level, outside the loop, at the existing ground level, containing, on the ground floor of the loop, shops, associations and day nurseries along an esplanade for pedestrians and cyclists; and a plant level, inside the loop, on a level with the housing units situated on the first floor of this loop, and extending towards the middle of the block as far as a cluster of facilities whose radius of action concerns the whole neighbourhood, access to it being controlled by the different filters formed by these different levels and the loop itself.

P+L A. - AIR
Perrin (Laetitia) (1973), Lesavre (Mathieu) (1972)

Cyrille Hanappe (1969)

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• Citadium, Familistère de Guise 2000