Arles - Villa Benkemoun (and Bank)
- department: Bouches-du-Rhône
- commune: Arles
- naming: Villa Benkemoun (and Bank)
- address : 915 chemin de la Batelle
- authors: Emile SALA (architect) and Alain JOUVE (collaborating architect)
- date: 1971-1974 (Benkemoun villa), 1971-1973 (Bank villa)
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) du 3 July 2012
The Bank and Benkemoun villas are two detached houses located in Arles, in the vast agricultural plain of the Fourchon district. Neighbours (they are located on two adjoining plots), contemporary (respectively built between 1971 and 1973, and 1971 and 1974), both designed by architect Émile Sala (1913-1998), they constitute a homogeneous architectural ensemble. The exceptional freedom granted by the owners of the works allows Émile Sala to deliver very personal architectures, in addition to the usual production, which testify to the fact that the individual habitat remains, in the early 1970s, an architectural experimentation laboratory.
A work of maturity, the architectural ensemble represents one of the most striking productions of Emile Sala. Like Paul Quintrand, he practices a participatory architecture approach in which the sponsors are at the center of the project.
The architecture of the Bank and Benkemoun villas is based on a double logic of interaction: the relationship of the villas with their environment and the relationships they maintain between them.
Part of the emergence of "bioclimatic" architecture in the 1960s, Emile Sala proposes an architecture taking into account the landscape, physical and climatic potentialities of the site. As is customary in Provence, the Bank and Benkemoun villas are open to the south and to the north to protect them from the Mistral. The curvature of the southern façades accentuate this protection.
The architect creates a number of interfaces between exterior and interior: terraces, roof terraces treated in gardens, solariums or patios, like the one in the heart of the Benkemoun villa, but also a set of holes. From the inside, he creates privileged views of nature; from the outside, he animates the facades according to "a harmonic logic".
Today, the hedge separating the two properties avoids any overall perception. The coherence of the architectural ensemble appears from the air: the villas seem to fit together.
This impression is reinforced by the formal unity of the whole: curves and counter-curves, fluid and dynamic spaces, flexible and extensive volumes, alternations of light and shadow. The architect banishes the straight line, favouring the articulation of convex and concave profiles.
It also bases its approach on a series of regulatory paths that are now difficult to reproduce all the logic. Emile Sala is thus part of a broader movement that, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, revisited the concept of organic architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and, to a lesser extent, Antoni Gaudí, had pioneered.
A great variety of spaces result: some pieces are circular, others elliptical, others still in Y.
If the bill is contemporary, a local dimension is nevertheless integrated: circular towers, reminiscent of the Provençal dovecote, ochre and thick.
Emile Sala is not in charge of interior design: the Bank calls on the decorator Patrice Guellec and the Benkemoun to Robert Heams on the advice of the architect. Emile Sala also invited them to address the sculptor Max Sauze (born 1933).
- Source: Inventory study of the architectural and urban production of Arles and Tarascon (13) from 1900 to 1980, drac paca/ Eléonore Marantz-Jaen, 2010
Read also in Heritage of the 20th century, the study Arles, city and architecture of the 20th century
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