Fernand Pouillon, l’architecte le plus recherché de France

Fernand Pouillon, once dubbed “France’s Most Wanted Architect”, designed and built over five million square metres during his fifty-year career, primarily in France and Algeria. Pouillon flew thousands of kilometres every week in propeller planes, travelling from one construction site to another: Marseille, Paris, Algiers, and even the middle of the desert. All in pursuit of a single principle: to build “better, cheaper, and faster than others, so that everyone could live in decent housing”.

His secret was stone, mechanically cut at the quarry into large, standardised blocks, a material he used in projects such as Climat de France – a housing development built in Algiers for the city’s poorest Algerian residents – and the reconstruction of buildings in Marseille’s Old Port, which had been destroyed during the war.

At a time when large housing estates were being built from prefabricated concrete, Pouillon gave social housing the quality and appearance of luxury buildings. But it all came to an end when Pouillon fell out of favour with the authorities, was imprisoned in the 1960s, escaped under mysterious circumstances, and was subsequently almost forgotten.

Beyond his tumultuous life, his social housing developments remain, displaying qualities that could still offer solutions to some of the problems facing large housing estates today.

The film is screened alongside Imaginaires de Transformation: Lacaton & Vassal et Frédéric Druot.