Zellige is a social housing complex in Nantes, France, designed in a collaboration between French architecture studios Tecto?ne and Tact Architectes.
The 100-home housing project has been shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020 and won the public vote in its category.
Three volumes are clad in matching brick
Tecto?ne and Tact Architectes arranged the apartment complex as three interlocking volumes clad in pale grey bricks.
The pair of studios won the competition to design the housing development for the future neighbourhood of Prairie au Duc in 2014.
The housing complex contains 100 new homes
Zellige is located on the île de Nantes, an island in the middle of Nantes. This post-industrial area was largely abandoned in the 1990s, and the project is part of a wider plan to rejuvenate the district. "This project is very impacted by the fact that it combines three very different housing programs, social rents, co-housing and to-buy apartments," said Tecto?ne.
"It has been a long and very interesting design process that included its future inhabitants in every part of it, through workshops, discussions and votes."
A spiral staircase twists up one side
Some 15 of the 100 homes will be co-housing, and the occupants had already been chosen before the design process began.

Taking on board the feedback of Zellige's eventual residents, the two practices included spaces and facilities such as common spaces and terraces, a communal workshop and wash house, a vegetable ga...