PANTIN: A Common House by Plan Común

PANTIN: A Common House, also known as Maison Commune, is a contemporary coliving and collective housing project designed by Plan Común in Pantin, France. Completed in 2023, the project redefines shared living through architecture, proposing a spatial model where collective life is not an accessory but the core architectural driver. With a total built area of 340 m², the project stands as a built manifesto advocating for openness, cooperation, and everyday joy through shared spaces.

Located on a compact 15 × 17 meter plot adjacent to the Parisian Cemetery of Pantin, an overlooked metropolitan green expanse of over 100 hectares, the project negotiates a delicate relationship between low-density residential fabric and surrounding industrial buildings. This unique urban context offers a “loose closeness” to the city, allowing Plan Común to explore an alternative domestic density rooted in generosity rather than maximization.

Designing the Brief: Self-Commission as Architectural Strategy

A defining aspect of PANTIN: A Common House is its self-commissioned process. Rather than responding to a conventional client brief, Plan Común developed the project from the ground up, leading the administrative, financial, and architectural processes simultaneously. This autonomy allowed the architects to maintain openness in both spatial and material decisions, ensuring coherence between values and built form.

Maison Commune thus operates as a learning tool, not only for its inhabitants, but also for the practice itself, demonstrating how architects can reclaim agency by designing their own briefs and assuming responsibility across all stages of development.

Site-Specific Decisions and the Value of Pre-Existence

Originally, the project proposed an extension of the existing two-storey L-shaped worker’s house toward the street. However, detailed studies revealed the fragility of both the soil and the existing structure. As a result, approximately 60% of the original building was demolished, allowing for the construction of a new, structurally robust framework.

This decision reflects Plan Común’s nuanced approach to adaptive reuse: pre-existence is not assumed to be valuable by default, but carefully evaluated on a case-by-case basis. What remains is a dialogue between old and new, grounded in pragmatism rather than nostalgia.

Structural Simplicity and Rational Construction

The architectural language of PANTIN: A Common House is intentionally restrained. The project is organized around a rational concrete skeleton composed of pillars and beams across three floors, completed with prefabricated concrete slabs and masonry infill. This clear structural logic simplifies construction while ensuring durability and flexibility.

Avoiding unnecessary complexity, the building site followed what the architects describe as a “common-sensical choreography,” prioritizing efficiency, clarity, and long-term adaptability.

Material Reuse and Low-Carbon Design

Sustainability is addressed through material reuse at the scale of the building. Reclaimed bricks sourced from Belgium: less than 300 kilometers away: were cleaned, tested, and reused on the street façade. Their roughness and patina are intentionally left visible, expressing age and material honesty.

On the interior façade, the bricks are painted white, enhancing daylight and unifying the shared garden space. This dual treatment reinforces the contrast between urban expression and internal communal life, while significantly reducing the project’s carbon footprint.

Building Less to Share More

Although local regulations permitted a four-storey structure, Plan Común deliberately limited the building to three floors. This decision preserves sunlight for neighboring properties and enables the creation of a covered shared rooftop space. By reducing private floor area, the project invests instead in generous collective spaces that foster interaction and community.

This attitude, building less private space to gain more shared space, is central to the project’s social and spatial philosophy.

A Sequence of Commons

One of the project’s most distinctive qualities is its exceptional ratio between private and collective spaces. Domestic areas total approximately 336.7 m², while collective spaces account for 230.2 m², forming a continuous sequence of shared environments throughout the building.

The main entrance features a transparent sectional door that directly connects the interior to the street, symbolically allowing the city to enter the building. Inside, a generously proportioned hall accommodates bicycles and trolleys, reinforcing its infrastructural and communal character. This space connects seamlessly to the inner courtyard and the existing house.

Vertical circulation spaces are treated as inhabitable commons. Concrete staircases cast on site are enclosed with lightweight polycarbonate, creating luminous cut-outs toward the courtyard. Translucent apartment doors further extend daylight into circulation zones, blurring the boundary between private life and shared movement.

The Greenhouse: Collective Life Elevated

At the top of the building, the shared system culminates in a 68.1 m² greenhouse, constructed with a lightweight wooden structure. This space integrates a communal kitchen and laundry, extending daily domestic rituals into a collective setting. Adjacent to it, a 40 m² terrace offers open views across the surrounding urban landscape.

The greenhouse functions as both a climatic buffer and a social condenser, embodying the project’s belief that architecture should prioritize what is shared over what is owned.

Collaboration as Architecture

The realization of PANTIN: A Common House relied heavily on collective intelligence. Architects, engineers, consultants, and builders collaborated closely throughout the process, refining solutions with precision and rigor. Certain elements, such as the bespoke handrail system developed with Studio Emile, emerged as “projects within the project,” reinforcing the ethos of shared authorship.

Architecture as Propaganda for the Common

In its final expression, PANTIN: A Common House positions architecture as a form of everyday propaganda, not in spectacle, but in attitude. Echoing Lina Bo Bardi’s belief in dignity through humble means, the project demonstrates how minor, precise architectural gestures can support generous, collective urban living within a stressed metropolitan fabric.

All photographs are works of  Javier Agustín Rojas