Celebrated, imprisoned, reviled, rebuilt: Fernand Pouillon, the lost architect of France | Architecture

Variously described as an “architect, painter, novelist, communist and convicted fraudster”, Fernand Pouillon’s life was punctuated by abrupt reversals of fortune which may have sprung from the pages of Dickens or Dumas. All through an eventful profession, he ricocheted from intoxicating success, to monetary scandal, jail, exile and eventual rehabilitation.In 1985, when Pouillon was in his early 70s, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by President François Mitterrand. But simply over 20 years earlier, Pouillon discovered himself in custody awaiting trial on costs of corruption. As a prolific architect-developer who had designed gargantuan housing schemes in France and Algeria, he was accused of funding irregularities and violating legal guidelines contrived to maintain the processes of design and building separate.A extra nuanced various to ‘courageous new world’ modernism … Outdated Port, Marseille, postwar improvement by Pouillon. {Photograph}: suppliedStaging a starvation strike, he was moved to a jail infirmary, from which he escaped by shinning down a rope smuggled in by his brother. On the run for eight months, he was dubbed “France’s most wished architect”, earlier than, with beautiful sangfroid, he turned up by taxi to the Parisian courthouse on the day his trial was because of start. Sentenced to 4 years in jail, he handed the time by writing Les Pierres Sauvages (The Wild Stones), a bestselling novel concerning the building of the medieval Cistercian abbey at Le Thoronet in Provence. The protagonist is a grasp builder who overcomes exacting working circumstances and sceptical friends by dint of sheer willpower.Often called “Pouillon le manifique”, Pouillon was an iconoclast who relished the trimmings of success. At one level he reportedly owned a Bentley, an Alfa Romeo, two chateaux, townhouses in Algiers and Paris, and a yacht. Pictures of the time present a suave, sharply suited man, with a luxuriant quiff of jet black hair, like a Gallic Bryan Ferry.His rise and fall is the topic of Fernand Pouillon: France’s Most Needed Architect, a 2023 movie by French documentary film-maker Jean-Marie Montangerand. “His persona and his antics overshadowed his work,” says Montangerand. “However his system was to construct higher, cheaper and sooner than others so that everybody might reside decently. He thought that magnificence mustn’t simply be the privilege of probably the most well-off.” Displaying for the primary time within the UK, it examines Pouillon’s life and exploits, with present and historic footage of his housing in Paris, Marseille and Algiers.A contemporary architect however not a modernist … kids within the central concourse of the Climat de France housing scheme, Algiers. {Photograph}: suppliedPouillon stays a divisive determine. However despite his entanglements, his structure has endured, its qualities changing into extra appreciated over time by customers and critics. Attuned to the historic kind and dynamics of cities, his buildings have come to be seen as a extra nuanced various to the “courageous new world” ethos of modernism.His quartet of Fifties housing developments in Paris imitate the historic grain and texture of the town, with courtyards, loggias, gardens and promenades. And within the postwar heyday of concrete, he unfashionably favoured stone as a constructing materials. “I hated the ugliness of render, the color of concrete,” he declared in his 1968 autobiography. “For me, the century of strengthened concrete posed issues of look, of floor, of the pores and skin of the constructing.” He favoured the creamy limestone of Provence, in its hefty, conventional, load-bearing kind, versus skinny sheets clipped to a metal or concrete body that represent most of at present’s “stone” buildings.“Pouillon was a contemporary architect however he was not a modernist,” argue Adam Caruso and Helen Thomas, who compiled one of many first English language monographs on Pouillon, almost 30 years after his demise in 1986. “He was trendy within the sense that Édouard Manet was a supremely trendy painter: attentive to the historical past of artwork and to the inevitable and mandatory continuity of tradition, whereas on the identical time being fascinated and enmeshed within the appearances and social mores of up to date life that performed out round him.”What emerges from Montangerand’s movie is a person pushed by ambition, constructing at dizzying velocity and quantity within the typically chaotic ferment of France’s postwar financial growth. As Pouillon himself put it, “200 housing models in-built 200 days for 200 million francs”. But he disdained the rabbit-hutch mentality of modernist mass housing – the grands ensembles that had been bobbing up in and round French cities. “Think about the disappointment of all of the individuals who, after working all day, depart their places of work to sit down of their rooms as in the event that they’re being punished,” he wrote.Not like Le Corbusier, the imperator of modernism, and a up to date (although the 2 by no means met), Pouillon recoiled from principle and abstraction. For him, structure was about constructing nicely and constructing effectively, just like the speculative builders of the Georgian and Victorian eras, optimising managerial processes and building methods to deal with particular financial and social wants. He understood the town as a community of public areas, every with a unique character to be skilled on the bottom. “I construct for the pedestrian, not the airplane captain,” he asserted.Building utilizing sooner, extra environment friendly constructing methods … on website at one in all Pouillon’s Algerian initiatives. {Photograph}: suppliedHis profession first took off when commissioned to rebuild massive tracts of Marseille, razed by wartime bombing and Nazi destruction. In January 1943 about 30,000 folks had been forcibly evicted from the historic Panier (“basket”) quarter housing immigrants and refugees, with 2,000 dwellings demolished by explosives.Pouillon’s reconstruction respects and reinstates the world’s scale and road sample. New housing blocks characteristic workshops at floor degree and humanising particulars, reminiscent of balconies enclosed by timber lattices. Down by the Outdated Port, a collection of lengthy, stone volumes resembling Nineteenth-century dockside warehouses lengthen alongside the Marseille waterfront, now the hang-out of vacationers and flâneurs who may by no means discover the small plaque positioned on one of many partitions denoting Pouillon because the architect.Pouillon’s design talent and his capability to navigate between the competing pursuits of politicians, planners and bureaucrats caught the attention of the mayor of Algiers, Jacques Chevallier, who enlisted him to offer dwellings for the town’s increasing inhabitants, as opposition to France’s colonial rule intensified. Between 1953 and 1959, Pouillon oversaw the development of three main residential initiatives, amongst them Climat de France, the most important housing venture in north Africa on the time, with 3,500 dwellings designed to accommodate over 30,000 inhabitants structured round an expansive central sq. or maidan.Whereas Pouillon publicly disavowed colonialism, his buildings had been nonetheless a part of an impetus to subjugate the Algerian Muslim inhabitants. Finally, nevertheless, they had been co-opted by the very folks they had been meant to regulate. Ringed by 200 three-storey excessive limestone columns, the monumental maidan on the coronary heart of Climat de France grew to become a well-recognized backdrop to political protest, from the Algerian battle of independence to more moderen confrontations in the course of the Arab spring.A haven … Belcastel, Aveyron, France, the eleventh century fortress (and village) restored by Pouillon as much as his demise. {Photograph}: Hemis/Alamy“Individuals have regularly taken possession of those areas, reworking and repurposing them,” says Montangerand. “The youngsters of Climat de France now proudly declare themselves to reside in ‘the Pouillon metropolis’. Structure needs to be judged by the quantity of life it permits to develop, which is why Pouillon’s work nonetheless resonates.”Ultimately launched from jail in 1965, however shunned by the French institution, Pouillon returned to Algeria, the place he discovered a extra receptive milieu within the nation’s post-independence period, designing housing, universities, inns and vacationer infrastructure. In 1971 he obtained an official authorities pardon, a tacit acknowledgment that his downfall might have been politically in addition to professionally motivated.Aided by Algerian craftsmen, Pouillon’s remaining years had been spent painstakingly restoring an ninth-century chateau in Belcastel within the south of France, not not like his grasp builder protagonist in Les Pierres Sauvages.When Le Corbusier died, his coffin was reverentially paraded by way of the courtyard of the Louvre accompanied by torch-bearers in navy uniform. Conversely, Pouillon was not one for posthumous pomp. In the present day, he lies buried in Belcastel cemetery, in an unmarked grave. His many monuments are elsewhere. Fernand Pouillon: France’s Most Needed Architect is on the Barbican, London, on 4 September