Mulhouse Cité Manifeste: A New Social Housing Laboratory

The Société mulhousienne des cités ouvrières, led by Pierre Zemp, is launching a manifesto project for social housing: a garden city for the 21st century, to be completed in 2003 and designed by four French architects and one Japanese architect. Initially proposed to Jean Nouvel, he brought in teams including Shigeru Ban (with Jean de Gastines), Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, Lewis Potin + Block, Matthieu Poitevin (Art'M architecture), and Nouvel himself. Each team received an equivalent plot to build twelve individual houses within standard construction costs. Nouvel's design features a triangular plot with houses under a single tapered roof, using large color planes. Lacaton & Vassal use agricultural greenhouses on a concrete base, offering loft-like spaces. Lewis Potin + Block create suspended and interlocking boxes blurring interior-exterior boundaries. Poitevin's radical approach eschews functionality, focusing on potential for life to 'color' the space. Shigeru Ban's project, the most classic, emphasizes space, light, and transparency with differentiated access. The project builds on Mulhouse's 150-year history of worker housing, originally designed by Emile Muller from 1853, which saw 1,240 small houses on 60 hectares. The article critically examines the paternalistic origins of such housing and the need for new societal foundations. The outcome will be assessed in 2003.