Arles, Tarascon Inventory of architectural and urban production (1900-1980)
The present documents (Synthesis reports, Directories, Monographs, Cartographic Album) are the result of the inventory study of architectural and urban production of the period 1900-1980 on the communes of Arles and Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône) launched by the DRAC PACA (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur) in 2008.
It was carried out between 2008 and 2010 by a study team consisting of:
- Eléonore Marantz-Jaen, architecture historian;
- Frédérique Bertrand, architect, graphic service provider;
- Arlette Hérat, town planner, assistant master at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Marseille.
Objectives of the study
The inventory study of the architectural and urban production of the period 1900-1980 in the communes of Arles and Tarascon constituted a pilot study whose primary objective was the knowledge and development of an abundant and heterogeneous production, which remains little known and often insufficiently taken into account.
It included several concomitant actions:
- make an inventory of this architectural and urban production, as exhaustive as possible, without stylistic, typological or programmatic prerequisites;
- identify this corpus (date, actors, project owners), as far as possible, by documenting it;
- to make an analytical reading of the corpus (1), in order to bring out remarkable buildings (or groups of buildings);
- to study in greater depth the buildings (or groups of buildings) identified as being particularly interesting, that is, to go from the scale of the "architectural and urban production" to that of the "architectural and urban heritage".
This study was therefore intended to generate a knowledge base and tools for disseminating this knowledge base, in order to make it available to the various stakeholders involved in the management and preservation of this heritage. One of the objectives was to enrich knowledge on areas under protection (Tarascon ZPPAUP, Protected Area of Arles). The knowledge acquired will also make it possible to select the major ensembles for certification as 20th century heritage.
General methodology
The method used by the study team was as follows:
- Identification and identification of the study corpus by a field survey;
- Identification and documentation of the study corpus through a literature search;
- Development of tools for disseminating the knowledge base generated.
Difficulties encountered
Some difficulties have led to important methodological choices. The main ones are the subject of the study itself:
- the duality of the object of study (2) has led to the generation of independent knowledge tools for each of the two communes.
- the importance of the geographical area concerned means that the inventory, if it achieves the objective of giving an accurate representation of the architectural and urban production of the period 1900-1980, in the communes of Arles and Tarascon, does not claim to be exhaustive (3). As regards the municipality of Arles, this has had an additional methodological effect: having chosen to distinguish the agglomeration from the whole of the municipality, we have drawn up two directories: one concerning Arles-agglomeration, the other concerning Arles-hors-agglomeration. Finally, we quickly took the position of building on the studies that had already been done to “evacuate” these topics to focus only on what had never been discussed
- the fact that the inventory must be drawn up without any typological or stylistic prerequisites has quickly confronted us with a major difficulty: how can we deal with the question of grouped individual housing, that is to say the question of individual house subdivisions? (5) This typology was eliminated from the inventory, although some exceptions were made when the operations seemed particularly interesting or representative.
Finally, concerning the city of Tarascon, added a documentary difficulty: the contemporary series of the Municipal Archives was not yet classified at the time we carried out our research (6), therefore we refer to the names of the files without being able to provide readers with the corresponding ratings.
The knowledge base formed
The inventory study of the architectural and urban production of the period 1900-1980 in the communes of Arles and Tarascon made it possible to identify 398 buildings or operations of which 315 are in Arles (235 in the agglomeration and 80 outside the agglomeration) and 83 in Tarascon.
From a typological point of view, this architectural and urban production is in line with what is observed across the country: it is dominated by housing (which represents more than half of the achievements), public architecture (which represents almost a fifth of the achievements) and public utility architecture (which represents just over a tenth) (7).
Programs/Sectors
ARLES + TARASCON | ARLES | TARASCON | |
Housing | 209 or 52% | 167 or 53% | 42 or 51% |
Public architecture | 66 or 18% | 49 or 16% | 17 or 20% |
Public utility architecture | 45 or 11% | 35 or 11% | 10 or 11% |
Commercial architecture | 25 | 21 | 4 |
Commemorative architecture | 13 | 7 | 6 |
Leisure architecture | 13 | 11 | 2 |
Industrial architecture | 9 | 8 | 1 |
Agricultural architecture | 8 | 8 | 0 |
Religious architecture | 6 | 5 | 1 |
Civil engineering | 2 | 2 | 0 |
Architecture of the tertiary sector | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Garden architecture | 1 | 1 | 0 |
TOTAL | 398 | 315 | 83 |
Beyond this statistical reading hides an architectural reality that is reflected in the knowledge tools generated by the study team.
The study team has established a number of tools for disseminating the newly discovered knowledge base in order to make it accessible to the study partners:
- Database (of the FileMaker type) and directories identifying and filling in the entire corpus inventoried (8);
- Documented computer mapping for spatial and thematic reading of this heritage (9);
- Monographs containing an in-depth analysis of the heritage elements considered to be the most significant: 11 dossiers concern the municipality of Tarascon; 23 concern the municipality of Arles (10).
- Synthesis reports offering a global, contextualized and analytical reading of the architectural and urban heritage of the period 1900-1980 of the municipalities of Arles and Tarascon (11).
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the study team:
- PACA DRAC: Sylvie Denante, Hélène Riblet.
- SDAP des Bouches-du-Rhône: Philippe Mercier.
- City of Tarascon: Aldo Bastié, Frédérique Gachet, Charles Fabre, Suzette Laffont, Emeline Roucaute, Valérie Virat.
- City of Arles: Jean-Marc Bernard, Odile Caylux, Antoine Lemaire, Christina Mourisard, Marie-Annick Poulin, Sylvie Rebuttini and the staff of the municipal archives of Arles Bouzid Sabeg, Hervé Schiavetti.
- Bouches-du-Rhône Archives: Olivier Gorse, Emmanuelle Reimbold.
- Inventory Department: Brigitte Fournel, Laurent del Rosso
- CAUE 13: Thierry Durousseau, Nicolas de Barbarin
- CAUE 30: Ms Llanta
- ARO HLM PACA: Philippe Oliviero
- UNICIL: Monique Jérôme, Mr Zocco, Mr Copello
- DDTM 13: Lysiane Bouvard-Dagois, Jean-Louis Livrozet
- 13 Habitat: Olivier Caron, Marc Vallère
All those who were kind enough to receive us, to open their institutions or their houses and their archives to us:
Mr and Mrs Arnal, Mr and Mrs Abram, Mr and Mrs Bank,
Mr and Mrs Benkemoun, Christine Blanchet, Jean-Lucien Bonillo, Jacqueline Buffat, Jean Chauchard, Jérôme Delbes, Mr and Mrs Gillot, Mrs Gégère, Mr Grosso, Pierre Guesnot, Mario Fabre, Loïc Hardy, Mr Huby, Agnès Lhere, Jean-Bernard Memet, Nicolas, Laurent Noet, Daniel Pinson, Paul Quintrand, Françoise Sala, Monsieur et Madame Smith, Monsieur et Madame Tuloup, Georges Vaché, Eric Van Migom, Josette Van Migom, Philippe de Vivies. As well as Audrey Ferrer, Dominique Gérard, Viviane Hamon, Stéphane Jaen, Magali Tur.
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(1) This analytical reading of the architectural and urban production of the period 1900-1980 on the communes of Arles and Tarascon was made on the basis of a reasoned criteriology allowing to highlight the scope of the buildings, groups of buildings or spaces generated during the period concerned. This analytical reading was made both on the level of a general history of architecture and the city (morphological, formal or stylistic positioning, contribution to the history of techniques, socio-cultural positioning in the production of the period), that on the level of a «micro-history» of architecture and the city, understood in its regional dimension (highlighting remarkable architectural and urban testimonies, contribution to the knowledge of the actors of the architectural and urban regional production of the twentieth century). These two scales of analysis fed each other.
(2) The study involved two communes, Arles and Tarascon. These are neighbouring communes, which have in common certain historical episodes (such as the destruction suffered during the Second World War and the Reconstruction that followed). But the fact remains that these two cities are very different from each other, each having retained its specificity during the 20th century. Their geographical proximity also suggested that common actors would intervene in both cities. This is the case for some of them (Pierre Vago, the architectural agency Van Migom-Pélissier, and, to a lesser extent, Emile Sala), but this is not a generality. As a result, the idea of being able to approach Arles and Tarascon as a single object of study quickly became irrelevant. Each of the two cities had to be studied on its own scale, as an independent entity. Of course, the duality of the object of study did not prevent the development of a comparative approach. This comparative approach has sometimes been particularly rewarding. For example, it allowed us to highlight the fact that Pierre Vago does not approach the reconstruction of the two cities in the same way. The architectural and urban solutions he proposes to Tarascon are quite different from those he implements in Arles. This double reading has therefore considerably enriched the reading that can be made of the work of this architect-urbanist.
(3) The problem was particularly acute for Arles, the first municipality in France by its size.
Even if we have tried to cover the whole of this territory (agglomerations, hamlets and isolated constructions, located outside and outside hamlets), it is obvious that we cannot claim completeness on this question. We have certainly missed some interesting and important accomplishments.
(4) For example, we have done little work on the issue of agricultural architecture, which has already been partially documented by a study conducted by the Inventory of Agricultural Cooperatives and by a pre-inventory established by the Camargue Regional Park. In the same way, concerning Salin-de-giraud, which could be the subject of a study in itself, we have almost not worked on the working-class cities Solvay and Péchiney, already documented by the studies conducted by historians Xavier Daumalin and Philippe Mioche or by the preliminary study for the establishment of a ZPPAUP conducted by Thierry Durousseau. On the other hand, we focused on the architectural and urban «peripheral» production of Salin-de-giraud (that is to say later or concerning public facilities), which was also particularly interesting.
(5) We found ourselves at odds with this corpus for several reasons. The first is due to the fact that our study ending in 1980, we took into account only part of this phenomenon (the moment when the phenomenon of individual housing subdivisions becomes a massive phenomenon). The second is that the individual housing group constitutes an extremely abundant corpus, difficult to understand on the ground and especially generally of limited architectural interest.
(6) This also shows the usefulness of studies such as this one, which, without claiming to constitute general studies, lay some groundwork for the history of the city and, on the other hand, for the archives, they have made it possible to make a sort of pre-classification.
(7) The typological distribution of the corpus includes twelve categories: Housing (individual, collective, mixed); Public architecture (administrative, school, sports facilities, etc.); Public utility architecture (technical, health, socio-cultural facilities, etc.) ; Commercial architecture; Commemorative architecture; Leisure architecture; Industrial architecture; Agricultural architecture; Religious architecture; Civil engineering; Tertiary sector architecture; Garden architecture
(8) Three inventories were developed from a database. They each correspond to a geographical area: Tarascon; Arles (agglomeration); Arles (outside agglomeration). Each of these directories is organized by geographical area (according to the allowed sectorisation in both cities), then in alphabetical order. Each building or operation is presented in the form of a sheet comprising four pages (Page 1: Identification, historical information and elements of analytical reading; Page 2: Old and current iconography; Page 3: Graphic documents and sources; Page 4: Summary note and heritage value).
(9) The cartography includes a historical cartography, ie an urban evolution map for each municipality and thematic maps (General map programs, Housing map showing the different typologies, Reconstruction operations, School architecture showing the different typologies).
(10) Monograph records are complete documentary records. Each one is devoted to a building or an operation that seemed particularly interesting. We have “improved” them since our previous steering committee. They are organized in three parts: context; description; biographical notes.
(11) For both cities, the summaries follow the same master plan, even if they contain some variations of detail at the content level.
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