Perret in Frankreich und Algerien

If Parabeton – Pier Luigi Nervi and Roman Concrete hops back and forth in time, then Perret in France and Algeria criss-crosses the Mediterranean Sea. Thirty buildings or ensembles (which can mean whole city quarters) by Auguste Perret are explored: twenty-one in France and nine in Algeria. While the former are mostly carefully preserved and feel like memorials to themselves, the latter are often either put to uses other than their original ones (e.g. Oran cathedral, which is now a public library) or are used by a very different section of the populace (e.g. the Algiers yacht club).
Algeria, three months after Perret’s death, started a war of independence which it won. Now, France desperately tries to remain the same. In contrast to its Italian pendant but similar to Maillart’s Bridges, Perret in France and Algeria is imbued with a deep sense of melancholia, as becomes a work more concerned with the body than the soul.
Part twenty of Emigholz’s architectural studies that form the film collection Photography and Beyond.