Fernand Pouillon

Fernand Pouillon, born May 14, 1912 in Cancon in the Lot-et-Garonne, was one of the great builders of the years of reconstruction after the Second World War in France.

He spent his youth in Marseilles where he attended the School of Fine Arts before continuing from 1932 to 1934 studying architecture in Paris. He built his first building at the age of twenty-two in 1934 in Aix-en-Provence. Fernand Pouillon undertakes an ambitious bet in Aix-en-Provence: 200 housing units to be built in 200 days for a budget of 200 million francs. Using stone and economical but quality plans, Pouillon won his bet. In 1953, he renewed this kind of performance by creating the complex of buildings in Diar-el-Mahçoul in Algiers: 1,600 housing units built in 365 days in perfect respect for the local architectural style and above all for the notion of urban space. . In Algiers will follow the ensembles of Diar-es-Saada and Climat de France.

In 1961, while some of the most important large complexes on the outskirts of Paris, in Montrouge, in the Point-du-Jour district in Boulogne-Billancourt as well as the new town of Meudon-la- Forest, he is at the heart of a resounding legal case following the revelation that he is also a shareholder in peripheral companies of the CNL by means of nominees. Indeed, an architect does not have the right to be neither a promoter, nor a contractor, or any other commercial activity related to the building. His friend Jacques Chevallier, the former minister, deputy and mayor of Algiers who never left Algeria, encouraged him to join him there. Fernand Pouillon therefore finds the house he occupied in the early fifties, the Villa des Arcades, which he will restore. It is therefore Algeria that will benefit from the skills of Fernand Pouillon for twenty years, until 1984, two years before his death. With the Minister of Tourism Mohamed Maoui, he will cover the Algerian territory with business or tourist hotels and seaside resorts. The Ministries of Post, Higher Education and the Interior also entrusted him with projects. Fernand Pouillon’s bitterness at having been solicited for his highest skill, cheap housing, neither by France nor by Algeria, when the needs were so great, will be immense until his death. In 1982 the Venice Biennale on the theme of architecture in Islamic countries paid tribute to his work, alongside Hassan Fathy, Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier.

While he completed triumphantly and in record time in July 1982 the construction of the El-Djazaïr hotel in Algiers (formerly the Saint-Georges hotel), in France events then rushed. Fernand Pouillon did return to the board of the Order of Architects and was elected to the Regional Council of the Order of Ile de France in 1980, but the total tax debt dating from the CNL is still claimed from him and the amount is very significant. The President of the Republic François Mitterrand will have at heart to help Fernand Pouillon to reintegrate France and to rehabilitate him by raising him to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1984.

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He died on July 24, 1986 in his castle of Belcastel in Aveyron, a very dilapidated but majestic ruin that he restored for seven years with a team of Algerian masons.