The project of the Ideal City of Chaux, the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, did not have a prison. She was placed outside the city, even before the front door.

The distancing of the prison institution is not recent, on the contrary it is a constant history: the relationship between prisons and their environment has always been complex. Social science professor Didier Fassin has devoted an ethnography to the prison environment: "If there is a closed universe, which deploys treasure of ingenuity and technicality to cut itself off from the outside world, it is indeed the prison world" .

Prisons have become "non-urban" or "out of the urban" objects over time, even when they have been built in the heart of cities. Often enclosed by a wall with one or more buildings inside, the architecture of the penitentiaries has reduced the field of action to the question of the treatment of the boundary between the inside and the outside, as well as to that control and surveillance.

Prison is not a problem in the strict sense of architecture: it is above all a sociological and political question. But since architecture encompasses all other disciplines, the semi-liberty district of Nanterre was above all an opportunity to confront this typology with recent societal considerations, with the ambition of blurring the feeling of heterotopia between the city and the enclosure of the penitentiary.

From the city to the cell:

The Nanterre site is located in a very heterogeneous urban area, between the suburban houses, the large estates of the 60s and some industrial buildings. The project aims to reconstruct a form of urbanity and proposes the definition of an architecture-city relationship through several forms: A facade instead of a wall, a more "flexible" transition space between the inside and outside, a volumetry that plays a central role between the different scales.

The specificity of the Nanterre project is based on the fact that it brings together two programs, each welcoming different audiences. The headquarters of the Penitentiary Services of Insertion and Probation of the Hauts-de-Seine (SPIP) ensures the follow-up of people placed under judicial surveillance, while the District of semi-freedom (QSL) allows a convicted fellon to benefit from a special regime of detention which authorizes him to leave the penitentiary establishment in order to invest himself in a reintegration project and thus to prevent the risks of recidivism. This juxtaposition of programs is unprecedented.

In the form of an L, the volumes of each program overlap: the SPIP program defines the built front while the QSL holding area develops inside the island core. From the outside, the building is a compact parallelepiped at the corner of two streets. As the only irregularity in the volume, on the South facade, the entrance to the semi-liberty quarter creates a large opening in the monolith.

Operation:

The office of the SPIP, located at the corner of Boulevard du General Leclerc and rue des Acacias, are oriented on the street. The reception area provides access to the interview boxes and collective action rooms of the R + 1, as well as administrative and management areas, located at R + 2 and R + 3.

The organization of the different areas of the minimum security prison of Nanterre is controlled from the protected entry point (PEP). Strategically placed, it enjoys a direct view of the reception yard which manages access to logistical, administrative and detention areas.

On four levels, the minimum security prison of Nanterre has 89 cells accommodating 92 prisoners. The cells are served by wide circulation and enjoy views, either on the promenade court or on the planted gardens, without vis-à-vis. The collective rooms (refectory, weight room, media library and laundry) located on the ground floor open onto the promenade courtyard.

Client: Ministry of Justice / Cost: € 13.5M excl. VAT / Surface: 4400 m² / Schedule: 2011 – 2019 / Batiserf Ingénierie (Structure), Nicolas Ingénierie (M.E.P.), Michel Forgue (Surveyor), Franck Boutté (HQE)

Photos credits: Cyrille Weiner & Charly Broyez