La costruzione della città. Gli “ensembles urbanes monumentales” di Fernand Pouillon

The residential neighbourhoods which Pouillon designed and realized aspired, in his own words, to become “monumental urban complexes”, in which it was proposed to lay out large and significant collective spaces and “arrange for people to live in beautiful apartments”. The architecture of the city centre is what interested him, to be realized through the construction of a collective space characterized by an idea of an architectural ensemble that defined the face of the city. For Pouillon “Ensembles are (...) the most necessary of isolated masterpieces: necessary, because they form a part of daily human life.” The city was the centre of his work, the theatre where human vicissitudes were played out. In building his houses and residential quarters, he never neglected to build the city by fragments. He tried to build places for people’s lives that were unqualified design objects. Pouillon’s residential districts, which would take on the form and nature of the “monumental urban complex”, resemble similar examples of 20th-century architecture that attempted to represent the new social conditions by a monumentality which could express a collective interest and a precise identity for the sites. These neighbourhoods have the complexity and compactness of the historical city, without any idea of re-proposing it, and aspire to a unity of intent. They are characterized by a composition of architectural types that engage with a structured and circumscribed urban situation while referring to ideas of the city, emphasizing a clear desire to define an accomplished and recognizable urban form, wherein the collective urban space constitutes the very reason behind the problem of constructing residential buildings.