Designed for Aubervilliers between 1975 and 1986, “La Maladrerie extends the Ivry experience over a vaster but simpler terrain of 9 hectares. Located at the edge of the town, yet not far from its center, the aim was to replace a virtual shanty town with a residential zone of a thousand units of housing, where a few modest neighborhood facilities were also planned: shops, a small cultural center, rooms for a home for the elderly, a kindergarten (…) The project plays the card of the continuity of a public pedestrian space, with no signs of division into city blocks. The placement of the buildings creates spaces of widely varying scales, ranging from the miniscule courtyard to the public garden, spaces opening on to the peripheral streets with protected, almost secret enclosures, sometimes placed overlooking the natural landscape. La Maladrerie, whose forms deliberately depart from the stereotypical image of the rigid social housing construction, does not, however, seek to break with the urban context (…): wherever possible, new constructions stand adjacent to existing buildings, erasing from the urban landscape their drab windowless walls.” (Renée Gailhoustet)
