Boboyakas, a cooperative housing project

As an alternative to retirement homes, the Boboyaka cooperative – a group of friends aged 55 to 70 made up of singular individuals with different dreams – is engaged in an innovative and challenging social project: a new form of housing for growing old together. Located in Bègles, the chosen site is a 3,600 m² (38,750 sq. ft) vast parklike garden. The project’s architecture is planned as a walk through a landscape whose grandeur can be sensed. It seeks to offer the knowledge and sensations of the site’s natural qualities. The buildings (21 dwellings and extensive communal spaces) are carefully placed behind trees, on stilts, preserving views of the whole site. The large ground-floor windows reflect the vitality of a pervasive natural world and changing oceanic skies. The project chooses to explore the dignity of humans at the end of their lives through freedom of movement, as opposed to isolation and withdrawal. The spaces are imagined around this movement: go wherever you want, visit friends, enter here, leave there, go to the garden, through the kitchen, return home, bring your loved ones, lead a workshop, and wander around in ease and comfort.