Ode pavillonnaire is first of all a film by Frédéric Ramade, released in cinemas in October 2007. This book is conceived as a genuine tool around the film and the question of suburban housing, not as an improved accompanying booklet. Starting from the main problem that pushed the director to make his film, it explores the successive stages of the project's gestation, and above all extends the work of reflection set up in the film through materials that appear little or not at all in it and follow other temporalities. Notes, quotations, maps, archive documents and photographs intersect to cast another light on the themes addressed and to follow the director's path between his initial intentions and the film as it can be seen today. The film shows dreary, identical façades repeating along tidy alleys, a heavy silence barely disturbed by passing cars; turned in on themselves and little inclined to sociability, housing estates and detached houses have, despite their defects, become the most widespread form of housing in France over the last thirty years. Back in the house of his childhood, Frédéric Ramade stages members of his family and leads them to look critically at the genesis of their house and the desires behind their aesthetic and technical choices; in telling their story, the family discovers an unsuspected stake of housing: speaking out.