5 September 2024
Auguste Perret, Architect, shaped my life. Literally. The formative years of early adulthood are said to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. From a childhood of country pursuits and open fields, my coming of age saw me stepping off a cross-channel ferry into a world of concrete. His world. Le Havre.
Growing up, movement was unguided, endless farmland, woods, meadows of tall grasses and flowers, in which to be lost, make dens, run wild. The only paths were ‘bridle’ for ponies and bikes. Here, in this new place, I was directed to walk through fixed streets, on levelled ground. There was a plan, an undercurrent for which I must develop a linear mentality.
Downtown Le Havre was flattened during the allied bombing in 1944. Post-war photos show strips of dark earth and an empty sky, a landscape without landscape. Images, so disturbing, my breath was held whilst scrolling. The new city, to rise from this debris during the 1950s, was to be designed by the 74 year-old Parisian Auguste Perret. With his team of over one hundred architects his job was to heal and bring order. There was mixed reaction to his aesthetic innovation. Many locals understandably wanted a return to their familiar.
My young adult self could not imagine this. This ‘brave new world’ was my brave new world.
I like what he did. This ‘Master of Concrete’ with his post war orthogonal vision. I love the gridline buildings, the pinky grey hues of his material, the mostly five to six-storey structures, the wide cobbled boulevards, the green corridor heading towards the beach, the solid parks and skinny fountains, the lengthy rectangular city hall with its giant contemporary clock on the perpendicular. And then, St Joseph’s Church, which he did not live to see completed. The octagonal tower rising over one hundred metres, visible as a brutalist lighthouse from the sea. The interior of exposed concrete and plain-coloured glass, barely ecclesiastical, difficult for catholic sensibilities. The theatre style fold-up seats recycled from a bombed out cinema.
How did I live in this city? There were people that I stood with at checkouts and public spaces that had known what went before. My young adult self could not imagine this. This ‘brave new world’ was my brave new world. Not a cliché to the just fledged. Every day I walked from my open-plan fifth floor apartment with its external glass wall facing south, to shops with adjacent outer covered walkways, the number of harsh squared reinforced pillars regulated and uniform. Instructed to carry out my retail pursuits with a pre-ordained sequence of steps. All this was strangely comfortable.
But it was also an urban environment that engaged well with nature. In sun or snow the concrete glistened rose gold. In late autumn, the line of trees in our street was overcrowded with starlings, thronging before sky born murmurations. The crescent of the beach, a visible soft curve of sand, changed texture to pebbles where it met the hard town waterfront. From there, when the tide is out you could see the skeletal remains of battle craft sunk. A reminder of why and how the new Le Havre exists.
Perret’s city was being added to by the time I arrived. Le Volcan, the Cultural Centre, designed by Oscar Niemeyer was almost finished. We locals called it the ‘yoghurt pots’. Even so, it was Perret’s buildings that were used as the backdrop for one of the largest concerts. When South African singer Johnny Clegg came to Le Havre, for ‘Juin dans la Rue’ 1988, the stage was set between the two high-rise blocks, where the widest avenue met the sea. And where 70,000 spectators filled the street behind me.
I am not an architect. My twenty years on the finance and business side, has given me a moderate architectural vocabulary, akin to conversational French. So I am ill equipped to express any opinion other than that of ‘user’. On the receiving end of an environment created by someone else, as most of us are, moving and living within its parameters dictates and forms our habits and tastes. It is the architect’s gift. Love it or hate it, you can’t return it with a receipt. Perhaps Le Havre’s influence on my own way of being was to make me orderly and symmetry loving, to feel at home with austere architecture. I have nostalgia for Le Havre. That was Perret’s gift.
Sarah Bianchi
Finance Manager at Design Engine (2001-2016)
