Marseille's new housing project completed

In Marseille's 8th district, CDC Habitat, as the project owner, completed in 2026 "Le village vertical," a housing project comprising 52 units. The surface area is 2,600 m² SDP, with a cost of 5.40 M€ HT.

Historical and urban context of the site

The old chapel neighborhood is described as a heterogeneous territory marked by a loose urban fabric between a village suburb, a set of autonomous collective housing, some facilities, and traces of local industrial heritage.

Characteristics of the area's architecture

The quality of this urban fabric mainly comes from the seaside streets that gather attached single-family homes and small residential buildings, the whole developing figures of adjacency, verticalities, and traditional gabled roof expressiveness.

Importance of the seaside villa architecture

The seaside villa architecture is particularly striking and has a strong patrimonial identity value. This reading of the site is essential because it presides over an approach whose objective seeks to highlight this identity of the coastal neighborhood and its exceptional location, between sea and hills.

Design challenge and goals

The agency sought to translate the apparent injunction between the idea of a village and the density necessary for the development of this neighborhood. Thinking about the city starting from this ambition is a major challenge.

Integration of built typologies

It is about highlighting the built typologies in dialogue with the architecture of the seaside town houses on one hand and creating an urban form adapted to social housing as well as to the scale of the block on the other hand.

Adaptation to the site's conditions

The project thus seeks to respond to the existing conditions of the site by highlighting a vertical and fragmented domestic architecture but composed in a very urban manner: street alignments, rigor in the ordering of facades, etc.

Morphological and aesthetic elements

This legitimacy of the built form is reinforced by the morphological work of the roofs that borrow from the neighboring urban fabric a language of gabled roofs with double slopes.

Layout and environmental considerations

Placed in two open plots around a green heart of the block, the project is composed along an east-west axis, offering through dwellings oriented towards the surrounding landscape.

Design response to environmental constraints

In response to the very strong exposure constraints of the site (sea, dominant sun and wind), the intention is to inscribe the project in a necessary durability of the envelope.

Aesthetic and symbolic features

The white architectural concrete plays effects of shells on the main facade panels while the expressiveness of the gables is treated with a game of vertical band stains, a nod to beach huts.