Ensembles & residences

Les Rosiers, southern façade of the building. © Thierry Durousseau, 2004-2005

Marseille has a remarkable heritage of the second twentieth century. The Radiant City is one of the world’s Corbusean icons, the Quai du Port belongs to the few major national port reconstructions recognized through the postmodern rereading of the work of F. Pouillon. These two examples show the great variety of this heritage which, through its moving production, is not limited to the works of great pioneers or to singular personalities, but also includes lesser-known testimonies, of the period’s architecture and history. However, we could not talk about a local school because the works are diverse. If the investigations on architecture of the second twentieth century are now about ten years old, this heritage remains largely less recognized by the edility and the public, hence the interest of the censuses and monographs proposed here.

Logically, after the census phase, which delimited the corpus of ensembles and residencies in Marseilles in its extension, the aim was to reduce their contours in order to develop a greater understanding, formalized by the monograph sheets. By definition, they reflect only one object of the corpus, but all the monographs thus constitute a collection covering a series of similar objects allowing the construction of typologies, classifications and comparisons.
This shows the importance of the choice of ensembles and residences giving rise to monograph cards. Part of the corpus has been distinguished by the Regional Commission for Heritage and Sites, with the attribution to twenty or so housing groups of the label Patrimoine du XXe siècle. For the rest, the selection was made not only on the basis of aesthetic criteria, but also from the point of view of the history of techniques, political, cultural, economic and social developments. The steering committee of the study, where social donors were well represented, guided the choice of operations in this social dimension. Dimension of which the city, over the period, has remained the theatre since the barracks of the displaced persons in 1945, the provisional housing of 1954, the return of the returnees from Algeria in 1962 finally, the slum settlement policy from the end of the 1960s.
In total, a sample of eighty groups of dwellings, giving rise to as many sheets, established on a common model.