Exhibition: Università degli Studi di Firenze

The contribution of the Faculty of Architecture of Florence to the exhibition Fernand Pouillon. Construction City Landscape is a study on the Vieux-Port project in Marseille.
The reconstruction of the Vieux-Port was a complex and troubled affair. Fernand Pouillon entered the scene following doubts of the city authorities and the owners regarding the first buildings built according to Leconte’s design. However, until now the drawings representing the various phases of construction had not been searched for in the right place. Reading and rereading the surviving documents, the correspondence, the exchange of messages between the various protagonists (Bonillo, 2008), we came up with the idea that Auguste Perret was the key to the story. Thus, after having found the plans of Pouillon’s project in Perret’s archive (the second one, to be precise), we succeeded – as a contribution of the Florentine research unit – to give an account of these aspects as well. In this specific case, the discovery of some drawings dated March 7th, 1951 in the “Fonds Perret, Auguste et Perret frères” of the Centre d’archives d’architecture du XXe siècle in Paris, made it possible to reconstruct a version of building number four of the complex on the Quai du Port, to the left of Puget’s town hall. This version differs from the built version in that the top section has two levels and a flat roof, instead of an only storey with a pitched roof: the latter solution had already been documented in the famous gouache for the buildings to the right of the town hall and then extended to all the others, probably according to Pouillon’s wish.

By the way, in order to fit into the logic of this itinerant and growing exhibition, it seemed natural to us that the Dar|Med research unit, recently founded at the DIDA (faculty of architecture of the University of Florence), should take on the challenge of the theme of the construction-reconstruction of the Saharan and North African landscape, by making a study model of the Hotel Gourara in Timimoun, thanks to the drawings discovered by Daniela Nacci during her research work.

Curators of the Florentine section of the exhibition: Francesco Collotti, Alberto Pireddu, Eliana Martinelli, Claudia Morea.
Model by: Eleonora Cecconi, Francesco Algostino, Olimpia Galatolo, Elisa Sgherri.
Laboratorio Modelli per l’Architettura del Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA Università degli Studi di Firenze
Director: Giovanni Anzani.
Photographs of the model: Laboratorio Fotografico di Architettura DIDA.
Director: Giorgio Verdiani