Conclusion
A total work of art, closed on itself like a Greek temple placed on its pedestal. Image of Auguste Perret’s architectural philosophy.
The City of Beisson is now an essential urban signal in the Saint-Eutrope district. Its unique profile embodies the image of a city that opened up to modernity between 1950 and 1960.
It stands out masterfully from other major social housing projects, which were all too often characterized at the time by monotony, emptiness and isolation, by its remarkable inscription, attitude and urban and architectural writing that are expressed in the homogeneity and coherence of its overall program: a reasonable scale, a single typology, a single material, a single rhythm.
Through these principles, Louis Olmeta gives it a warm and human dimension, an innovative identity force and a singular aestheticism where the avant-garde modernity of his time and historicism are combined.
The urban quality of the city of Beisson reveals the personality of an unknown architect who imposes his modern writing in the existing fabric while respecting the local architectural discourse inherited from classical values. It joins in this sense the classic modernity of the constructions of the architect Fernand Pouillon.
His remarkable skill in the use of proportions, references to antiquity and classicism are recreated according to a pure modernism and without unnecessary picturesque archetypes which also refers to the constructive and aesthetic principle of modern classicism of the architect Auguste Perret for whom "the eternal sense of lines and forms" presides over his work.
Before the end of the construction works, the operation gained national notoriety, which was disseminated in one of the largest specialized architectural magazines of the time, and still today: Technology and Architecture. In 1961, the journal publishes a special issue devoted to the most innovative achievements of the OTH, the Parisian bureau of studies, assistant to the realization of the program.
The rediscovery of the contemporary heritage of the city of Aix-en-Provence, is recent.
The architecture of the Thirty Glorious Until now it seems to have only a few assets when confronted with the extremely rich and seductive classical heritage of the historic city.
But the decline of time means that today the city Beisson enters the history of French architecture and is a model construction of the twentieth century.
It illustrates the aesthetic values of the years 1950-1960 by moving away from the usual clichés attached to the architectural and urban theory of this period: those of abstract functionalism and stereotypical mass production.
May this study help preserve the heritage qualities of the whole.
