Djuric Tardio Architectes, Imbrications, 2016. Gennevilliers.

A controlled and adapted densification, a r-evolution in energy management: the "eco-controlled density"
Hyper-urbanity, migration towards cities, and the lack of properties are issues largely approached. The solution most examined in depth was that of density, both in city centres and the outskirts. Yet a lot is still to do. Against the tide common thought about densification, it is possible to find lasting solutions from architecture at a small-scale without giving up the reflection on the individual housing.
Thus, density can be reinterpreted in terms of ecologic, social, economic, and urban revialisation, profoundly in both the short and long term. About ten eco-sustainable city houses for private individuals, built in wood, were used as laboratories to develop innovative solutions both on the reinterpretation of the territory and the production, consumption, and storage of energy. The data gathered constitute a basis to imagine the city of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. The lack of surface, the weakening of the economic model partially linked to the toxicity of loans, and the necessity to control the consumption of energy served as many unavoidable constraints that guided the research towards solutions and compromises expressing the best synergies of sustainable housing, city, and energy.
Respect of the territory is fundamental. The projects must be vehicles for urban and architectural specificities they must also function as epicentres of social awareness to sustainable development and to the “eco-controlled density”. “Eco-controlled density” is an investment concept of the suburban areas that accentuates the respect of the urban and architectural estate while densifying it and maximising its energies.
Some architectural principles of interconnection and increase of the existing, first developed in this project in Gennevilliers (suburb of Paris – France) with the Boucle de la Seine's council estate cooperative, take into account the embodied and local energies. They are coupled with in situ renewable intelligent production, energy storage in a battery like one designed by TESLA, and with the sharing of this production with the surrounding buildings. This creates an effect of energy transition larger than the any project in these neighbourhoods. The intelligent occupation of the available properties and the creation of services and local equipments completes a controlled and adapted densification. This position takes the opposing view of the anti-spread schizophrenic concept that lead to congestion and the asphyxia of the territory and the people.
More than avoiding the perverse effects of sur-densification, “eco-controlled density” is an alternative to the identity abnegation of cities and neighborhoods bordering hyper-centres, energy-hogged in every sense of the word. It creates elements for an adapted suburban Smart Grid; new sustainable local town planning for a specific and identity territory that refuses to be swallowed by the "capital" city.