Detritus Villa: making a house out of waste in Nantes
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Translation by:
Nettah
Stuck for what to do with your timber or old tarpaulin lying around the garden? In western France, dynamic architects Fréderic Tabary, Yann Falquerh and 150 volunteers have embarked on a crazy project to build a house out of scrap and waste. Your ears are not deceiving you: a mansion made out of trash. No surprise as we are in Nantes, recently chosen as European green capital for 2013. French photographer Anne-Lore Mesnage followed the construction which will be inhabitable from 2 December 2010
Nantes is a city where the car has given way to the tram. In 2004, Time magazine considered it Europe’s most liveable city. There is a message behind the architectural endeavour: today only 15% of industrial waste is recycled and 80% is sent across the world to be incinerated.
Frédéric
Tabary came up with the idea of Detritus Villa. ‘This is not an eco-operation, nor an organic one. The materials are not ecological. This is an operation designed to demonstrate that we consume too much. It only took us twenty days to gather all that was necessary for the house. And that’s nothing, it’s maybe a thousandth of the total consumption in Nantes that ends up in the bin every day’ (Image: © Anne-Lore Mesnage)
Two volunteers sort through the waste. Wood is recovered from old apple crates (Image: © Anne-Lore Mesnage)
‘It is not necessarily anti-growth to suggest that we reuse waste to build a house,’ says one volunteer on the construction site. ‘That is the challenge that we have set. Will the house be inhabitable for a long time? I don’t know. Nevertheless, there is perhaps a niche to be found with this idea of compromise between environmental responsibility and production’ (Image: © Anne-Lore Mesnage)
To insulate the house: take recycled paper, add water and with the help of a concrete mixer, turn it all into bricks. For the cladding, an apple producer has generously delivered the treated wood from his crates - they no longer conformed to European standards, and what good would it do to throw them away? (Image: ©Anne-Laure Mesnage)
The ceiling has been perfectly weatherproofed thanks to the use of old lorry tarpaulins. The windows were taken from a manufacturer who was unable to sell them due to an error with the sides (Image: ©Anne-Lore Mesnage)
‘There are many things to say about this construction,’ one lucid volunteer on the site states. ‘We are far from meeting all the standards. The idea, however, is great and communicative and that is what matters. We are talking about a project that is totally crazy, but in the end very human’ (Image: © Anne-Lore Mesnage)
Could Fréderic Tabary’s assistant Pauline Moussier live there? ‘I could honestly see myself living in this villa,’ she says. ‘That is the goal of the project, in fact. We wanted to demonstrate that this is an inhabitable house. We specified with the designers that the waste should not be visible so that everyone can feel at home here, or even more comfortable’ (Image: ©Anne-Lore Mesnage)
From January 2011, the house will be moved to the eco-district La Bottière-Chénaie in Nantes and will be handed over to an association selected by the city based on an open call. It will become the symbol of sustainable development in the region. Only just finished, the waste villa has already won popular appeal and similar operations will be carried out in different cities in France and abroad in the months to come (Image: © Anne-Lore Mesnage)
Translated from Villa Déchets à Nantes : rien ne se perd, tout se recycle !