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.
1.0915 - La Pauline
Sainte-Marguerite, northwest of the 9th arrondissement
Literature references: 20th century heritage, domestic architecture
X Edition directory number: 0915, p19. 2005
Conception & writing T. Durousseau arch. 2007
designation: La Pauline
296 avenue Romain Rolland, quartier de Sainte-Marguerite 13013
Lambert 3: latitude 3.0742; longitude 43.2738
Access: metro 2: Bougainville - Dromel
bus 15: Dromel - Escourtine, bus 17: Dromel - Parc des Bruyères
Owner: Co-ownership of the Pauline
Sogestima, Victor’s Lighthouse
program: 975 housing projects, Economic and Family Housing (LOGECO).
Client: SCI La Pauline.
Société Marseillaise d'Habitation Coopérative d'HLM.
Bon Logis Real Estate Company.
Set of 26 buildings, shops, Youth House (1962), church and public garden.
dates, authors: Building Permits: 1957. Last certificate of conformity: 1963.
P. Averous, J. Delbes, A. Michel, M. Scialom, A. De Lavaurie, architects.
Église (1961) and Maison des jeunes (1962) P. Averous, architect, label patrimoine XXe.
Entreprises, M. de Bouillone, Léon Ballot, Savio & Joly, P. Cauvet.
site: Between the Huveaune and the Chemin de Sainte-Marguerite in Saint-Tronc. Altitude between 16.00 and 22.00 m. Residential area discontinued E on the Master Urban Plan of 1949.
mass plane: Centered on north-south track. Buildings oriented north-east/ south-west but not systematically. Spreading: constant height, R+4 on cellars.
frame: Concrete constructions with load bearing facades, marked by LOGECO standards but with various bills. Good general condition.
sources: AD: 2071 W 10 (34.587, 34.588, 34.589), 165 W 989-991, 12 O 2182, 77 J 627-633
Background:
Almost ten years after the Liberation, the housing crisis remains central for the Ministry of Reconstruction. In the spring of 1953, the former mayor of Le Havre, Pierre Courant, passed a series of measures designed to promote the rapid and massive construction of new housing by associating a land law with a new method of financing and standardized programming. The creation of Popular and Family Economic Housing (Logeco) was aimed at modest incomes (victims or poorly housed) to finance the purchase of housing responding to standard plans that can be resold or rented for small amounts. The ambition of the ten-year plan was overshadowed by Abbé Pierre’s appeal the following year.
On the same date, G. Defferre became mayor of Marseille for a long time and will engage the city in this construction policy by various means: land purchases, financing subsidies, landscaping of outdoor spaces or improvement of services. With its 975 housing units, La Pauline is an ambitious operation organized in subdivision whose outdoor spaces will quickly fall into the public domain, each building constituting a lot.
Description:
The whole Pauline is not a great success, but remains signicant of the situation of her time. ZUP will be created several years later, and the mass plan realized shows that with a multiplicity of stakeholders (builders, architects, companies), the composition will struggle to last. We cannot imagine that such a plan was not guided by the department’s architect-in-chief. There are all the rules of the moment: central lane (avenue Laetitia) distributing on both sides of the cob buildings forming an open and antiperspective mass plan. The plan was approved by the extra-municipal commission in February 1955, but the 45° organizational framework relative to the boundaries of the terrain was often altered by less homogeneous orientations. Lot 13, assigned to the school group, will finally host an apartment building.
It will result in some confusion of reading that only will come to redeem the church and the youth house signed by P. Averous. Moreover, no less than half a dozen architects worked for eight years to complete the operation without a chief architect. According to the archives, we can think that A. Michel is the author of the overall plan, but the testimonies still give other hypotheses.
The multiplicity of authors, contractors and companies, the duration of the operation will give rise to interpretations variants of the standard plans.
The plans show constants that update the LOGECO standards, a real technical policy aimed at improving the industrialized habitat.
In the first place, the constant height of the buildings which since the MRU competition in 1949 defines R+4 as the threshold of distributions without lift.
This constant gauge is one of the signs of the uniformity of the urban landscape.
The frames, imagined in the first concrete projects with filling facades, will be realized with load bearing facades. There will remain a line of concrete posts in the longitudinal axis of the buildings or a masonry median refend, or transverse refends.
With two apartments crossing each floor, the thickness of the buildings varies between 8.50 m, 9.45 m and 10.85 m. This thickness of the building, necessarily limited by the mode of ventilation (shunt), shows very variable yields between the living area and the developed floor area. While most buildings are pure parallelepipeds with loggias set back from the façade, some still have redent facades with prominent balconies, bringing them closer to the HBM.
Internal distribution is also marked by standards. The entrance, sign of the distribution of the apartments of the bourgeois building, disappears most often in favor of a direct access to the stay that orders the other rooms.
The proximity of the kitchen and the rooms of water, toilet and bathroom, being separated, this grouping is done around the dryer, functional loggia where the garbage can is. The architecture of the facades will follow these variations that can sometimes change in time for the same author. This is the case for P. Averous whose many buildings are gradually moving towards the standards of the moment.
In this sense the Pauline remains one of the laboratories where new modes of architectural production are made, showing among other things the difficulty of finding urban coherence in the strict logic of private properties.
Authors:
Pierre Averous and Maurice Scialom
Pierre Averous born in 1927 in Marseilles and Maurice Scialom’s one-year younger are graduating in 1953. He worked with A. Devin for Campagne Larousse in 1958.
From 1957, the association of P. Averous and M. Scialom will give a number of achievements such as:
Saint-Barthélémy, Picon-Busserine, 1962, with Bondon and Madeline,
Les Cèdres, 1965,
Val Pin and the American, 1968,
Massalia Jaurès, 1969,
Les Néreides, 1971.
Subsequently P. Averous will be a founding member of Atelier Delta with Y. Bonnel, L. Dallest and R. Perrachon.
Jean Delbes,
master builder who became an architect after the Liberation, is the author of many houses:
Arles, the Trebon,
Martigues, La Ferrière,
and Aubagne, Ganteaume,
but also Marseille, boulevard Ch. Livon, la Tourette, rue Loubon, boulevard D. Casanova, rue M. Lauze.
He will partner with his son Georges Delbes, architect graduated in 1962 who will participate in the realization of the Grand Pavois in 1975 with Guillaume Gillet, and Bernard Laville.
Albert Michel,
architect, present on various projects in Marseille:
Sainte-Geneviève, 1961,
Towers K, 1968-69,
Massalia Jaurès, 1969,
Les Oliviers, 1968-72.
Associated files:
- Map of the 9th district of Marseille
- Documented Monograph Record
© Thierry Durousseau, 2004-2005