Marseille 11th - Service station
- department: Bouches-du-Rhône
- municipality: Marseille
- naming: Gas station
- address : 173 boulevard de Saint Loup
- author: Jean PROUVE (engineer)
- date: c. 1970
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) du 15 March 2007
"At the end of the 1960s, oil tankers began their commercial struggle on the ground of branding… Total asked Jean Prouvé to design a model that, from the simple station to the large motorway areas, in town and in the countryside, could express a modern and functional image.
As usual, Prouvé went to the essential and imagined a diptych. A decagonal building would house on the ground floor the reception, the sanitary facilities and the reserves, and would offer upstairs a housing. A circular canopy (perched on a central column) or rectangular canopy (well set on four metal posts) would protect the pumps.
Proved defended a light, industrialised architecture therefore easy and quick to install on the site. The gas station proves it, it even constitutes a quasi-manifest: a slab on a crawlspace, a central barrel to stabilize the building, stow the beams that support the floor and group all the fluids, peripheral posts and filler panels. In less than two weeks the case was heard".
Among the examples remaining in Marseille, it is possible to note that the adopted plan is octagonal and not decagonal, and to identify two types of stations, depending on whether they have a floor of housing (boulevard Saint-Loup and chemin de Sainte-Marthe) or not (boulevard Paul Claudel).
- Editor: Eve Roy, drac paca crmh, 2006
- Source: D. Amouroux, C'était au temps… des modèles, 303, no. 67, 4th quarter 2000, pp. 218-219
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