The move of the CAF (Family allowance fund) from its historic site is not a trivial gesture for the city of Rouen, as it marks the end of a period that began in the middle of the last century.

This new housing programme is envisaged through the history of the site and its construction. The ambitions of the project respect the perennial elements of the site in order to magnify and enhance them (the mansion, but also the near and distant landscape). Thus, the aim is to offer a strong architectural image on the scale of the district while respecting the adjoining buildings, in its morphology and materiality, to multiply the means of access to the great landscape (western slopes, loop of the Seine, town centre, etc.) from the site but also from the diffuse fabric to the north and to complete the landscape reading of the hillside by precise landscaping work within the plot.

Between tradition and modernity, the district of the western slopes of Rouen, in which the project is inserted, and on a larger scale, the Pasteur district, is characterised by a sparse and relatively homogeneous architecture of brick and flint townhouses and apartment buildings, where more recent and larger-scale interventions have appeared over the last twenty years, inviting a new, more contemporary architectural era in a diffuse urban fabric. The use of brick as a reference material for the project establishes continuity with the architectural history of the district; far removed from a backward-looking vision, the use of terracotta makes it possible to reinterpret the picturesque image of the district, by matching the colourimetry of the bricks in blocks, depending on the terraces and the situation: sepia colour along the rue des Forgettes, white and grey colours on the outskirts of the town house, strong red for the town houses, and anthracite for the western block. The latter is visible from the left bank as an urban landmark emerging from the hillside vegetation...