Le Corbusier in Algeria: The Quest for the Human Scale in Architecture
During the french colonisation of Algeria (1830–1962), and after more than one century of discrimination, some studies were done in the aim to understand, search and draft a new form of housing for Muslim population. At this moment, the visit of Le Corbus
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ract During the french colonisation of Algeria (1830–1962), and after more than one century of discrimination, some studies were done in the aim to understand, search and draft a new form of housing for Muslim population. At this moment, the visit of Le Corbusier was done (1931). The question of housing brings other interest on human proportion, habits, ways of life, religion and culture. Consequently, new concepts appeared such as «habitat», «échelle», «cité de recasement». The principal questions were the integration of human scale as a complex paradigm. Our aim through this paper is to draft at first, a brief theoretical overview on the quest of human scale in the vernacular architecture of Algiers, which were classed universel heritage by UNESCO (1992), then, to demonstrate the evolution of this question and their relationships with the «Modulor». Keywords Human scale · Vernacular architecture · Algeria · Le Corbusier
1 Introduction: The Search for a New Building Form After a century of French colonization in Algeria, based primarily on industrialization and ethnic separation, the question of how to house the native Muslim population arose [1, 2]. The question concerned whether to construct houses that met their specific needs, or whether the population should adapt their lifestyle to that of Europeans [3, 4, 5]. These questions became more pressing as housing shortages led the population to begin to build shanty towns [5, 6]. This provided the trigger for the active development of housing suited to the needs of the colonized population. Initial work took into account not only the architectural heritage, but
L. Chebaiki-Adli (*) Laboratoire Architecture et Environnement, École Polytechnique d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme, Algiers, Algeria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 J. Charytonowicz (ed.), Advances in Human Factors and Sustainable Infrastructure, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 493, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41941-1_8
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also customs, traditions, lifestyle and sanitary conditions [1]. Although this led to a phenomenological understanding of the problem, it was not reflected in the development of a native, vernacular architecture (the Casbah), but new, autonomous settlements. This highlights a striking parallel. While the architects of the International Modern Architecture Congress (CIAM) were trying to understand the principles underlying new, anarchical housing forms, the visit of Le Corbusier to Algiers in 1931 focused on the vernacular constructions of the medieval historic city [7, 8, 9, 10]. While the CIAM’s work led to the construction of ‘resettlement’ cities, Le Corbusier’s work was enriched. He completely revolutionized architectural paradigms, based on a human-centred theoretical approach that viewed man as the ideal scale [11, 12, 13]. The question of the human scale is a multidimensional problem. Here, we clarify the issues through a brief comparison of the following philosophies: Vernacular architectur
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