"...dans le milieu de la Ville qui fait face à la place, se trouvent tous les besoins publiques..." : remarques sur la notion de centralité urbanistique en Louisiane coloniale et à New Orleans

The founding of the colonials towns of "La Mobile" (Mobile. Al.) and "La Nouvelle Orléans" (New Orleans, La.) illustrates the original French type of town-planning. In New Orleans particularly, all powers focused on a central square. This "place d’Armes" appears as the basis of the symmetrical grid of the town itself. After the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the place d’Armes, becoming Jackson Square in the name of the general who had defeated the British army, acquired the status of a national symbol in a rapidly growing town. Today (at least before Katrina...), are the "Vieux Carré" and Jackson Square itself, nothing but the image of a city, a frozen area in a touristy and gentrified historical landmark

De la case au grenier : bref aperçu des habitats ruraux des « nègres » et des maîtres dans la Louisiane coloniale des années 1720-1740

S’il existe d’assez nombreuses représentations de l’habitat urbain colonial de la Louisiane, les témoignages de l’habitat rural sont moins importants. Qui construit, comment, pour qui ? En réalité ces questions trouvent ici le plus souvent la même réponse, puisque les nouveaux colons ont fréquemment une maison en ville et une plantation hors de la ville, ces deux types d’édifices observant des règles de construction assez voisins, employant les mêmes matériaux, et le plus souvent, la main d’œuvre des mêmes esclaves. Quelques acteurs fortement identifiés par leurs écrits ou leur production iconographique, peuvent être remarqués. On évoquera les travaux de De Batz, Caillot, Dumont de Montigny ou Le Page du Pratz, dans les années 1720-1740, qu’il s’agisse de projets d’édifices techniques, de relevés de constructions indigènes, de plans généraux de plantations affectées à différentes productions : indigo, riz… De la maison de maître au camp d’esclaves, les typologies architecturales s’avèrent fortement différenciées, moins luxueuses toutefois que dans des colonies susceptibles de créer d’importantes plus-values, comme Saint-Domingue. La qualité de quelques ingénieurs ne pallie guère la médiocrité du personnel colonial, ou l’impéritie de la direction des affaires, que ce soit sous le régime de la Compagnie des Indes ou sous la régie royale. Aucune trace autre qu’archéologique ne nous est parvenue de cet habitat rural de la Louisiane des Indiens ou des premiers colons. Cependant les formes, les procédés et les matériaux employés par l’ancienne architecture rurale de Louisiane, ont connu une pérennité due à la simplicité d’une construction autoproduite, rudimentaire et facile à transmettre ; pérennité que les ouragans ont moins mise à mal que le PreFab Housing.If there are quite a number representation of the urban colonial Louisiana, the testimonies of rural housing are less important. Who built what for whom? Actually these matters find most frequently the same answer, because new colonists commonly owned a house in town, and a plantation outside the city. The two types of building observed quite similar construction rules, using the same materials, and most often, the labor of the same slaves. Some actors can be noticed, as they are strongly identified by their writings or their iconographic production. One will evoque the work of De Batz, Caillot, Dumont de Montigny and Le Page du Pratz, in the years 1720-1740, and their technical projects of buildings, their descriptions of indigenous villages, or their general plans of plantations houses assigned to different productions: indigo, rice ... From the big house to the slaves camp, the architectural typologies of Louisiana are proving strongly differentiated. They look less luxurious than in a colony like Saint-Domingue, that can create more significant gains. The quality of a few number of engineers overcomes the colonial personnel, or the incompetence in the leadership of commerce, whether under the Company of the Indies and/or the Royal direction. We got only some archaelogical tracks from these architectures made by Indians or early settlers in Louisiana. However, forms, processes and materials used by these rural architectures, have experienced continuity due to the simplicity of a vernacular construction, rudimentary and easy to pass. And the hurricanes have less undermined this sustainability than the use of PreFab Housing

Les origines des premiers parcs de divertissements parisiens

The origins of the first public amusement parks in Paris. The earliest public amusement parks in Paris date back to the second half of the eighteenth century. During the reign of Louis XV, Torré’s « vauxhall » and Ruggieri’s « garden » were opened, followed, under the Directory, by the famous Tivoli. This last was transformed into a « garden-spectacle » twenty-five years later. Such gardens were a complete novelty, and their origins are not well known. The present article sets out to study some aspects of their birth and development. The Torré venture, for example, turns out to have been as much a theatre as a garden, whilst Ruggieri’s garden (« enclos ») was primarily a place for promenades, featuring spectacles of enormous variety. Tivoli, finally, was an « eclectic » garden, launched around 1770. The article’s description of this garden is based on notarial sources which give details on the various decors. Their architecture was of neo-classical inspiration, and a landscape « collage » integrated « French », « Italian » and « English » elements. These singular places have all disappeared today, but they represent the beginnings of a new form of organised amusement for the general public which thrives today in many amusements parks and leisure centres.Langlois Gilles-Antoine. Les origines des premiers parcs de divertissements parisiens. In: Histoire de l'art, N°19, 1992. Varia. pp. 51-63

Présentation du Réseau Scientifique et Pédagogique « EnsaÉco »

International audienc

Présentation du Réseau Scientifique et Pédagogique « EnsaÉco »

International audienc

À Yaoundé, la halle APLEX ultime de Robert Le Ricolais

The French engineer Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977) is at the forefront of the inventors of spatial structures of the 20th Century. He practically built only models and ephemeral buildings, during his life shared between France and the USA. However, in May 2017, we found in Cameroon one of the twin large warehouses that he had erected in 1950 for the Ministry of Finances of the former french colony. Tracing the production of its projects and real-scale models, built in France for exhibitions or Post-War experimentations, this article introduces the « garage » of Yaounde among the theories and practices of the engineer, who was considered by his friend Louis Kahn and by a variety of French architects like Laprade, Pingusson, Prouvé, Huet, Chemetov, Emmerich and Mimram, like one of the most important source for their own architectural design and work. Thus, this only testimony existing in the world of a big wood and metal APLEX structure (a spatial concept patented by Le Ricolais) represents an important moment of the History of Construction and Architecture. One of its former student at Penn, the professor Peter McCleary, has reported in 1994 on the methods adopted by the engineer. He wrote: « Le Ricolais accepted the engineer's task of minimizing the potential energy of the loading and maximizing the strain energy of the structure. To reach this goal of "infinite span, zero weight" he built interminable comparisons of opposed solutions to a project, believing that deductions and propositions must prove themselves, and not be mere seduction or good intentions ; they must come to the facts. » The warehouse in Yaounde is the only survivor of these "facts" of Le Ricolais.The building, called « garage administratif », covers some 36 700 square feet (328 x 112 feet), over the River Mingoa, in the neighborhood of the Municipal Lake. Surprisingly, after 68 seasons of equatorial rainfall, after periods of violent winds, after some years of poor maintenance, its state of preservation is pretty good, whether its concrete base, the pieces of wood of its framework or the metal connecting elements. This testifies of the foreknowledge of its architectural design and of its high quality construction.Nevertheless, this amazing building is nowadays extremely threatened, for several reasons. The first is the total lack of interest or study on this garage during more than 67 years: we hope that after our research, this point will be no longer a problem. The second point is that these very past years, the twin-building near this one has been destroyed without any protest of anyone. The third is that there is a new big project for the urban redevelopment of the Mingoa Valley, in which the warehouse by Le Ricolais is totally unknown and neglected.La redécouverte en mai 2017 du garage administratif de Yaoundé, le rescapé des deux hangars construits au Cameroun selon le brevet APLEX de l'ingénieur Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977), ouvre un champ d’observation et de réflexion sur l’architecture qui outrepasse l’intérêt historique de ce bâtiment.En effet c’est le seul survivant des grands ouvrages singuliers de cet ingénieur qui a révolutionné le champ de la morphologie des structures en inventant les premières charpentes tridimensionnelles. Quasiment non documenté à ce jour, le garage administratif fait l’objet de cet article, qui le situe parmi les travaux et les recherches de Le Ricolais avant son départ pour les USA en 1951 et démontre les menaces qui pèsent sur sa survie

In Yaounde, the ultimate APLEX warehouse of Robert Le Ricolais

La redécouverte en mai 2017 du garage administratif de Yaoundé, le rescapé des deux hangars construits au Cameroun selon le brevet APLEX de l'ingénieur Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977), ouvre un champ d’observation et de réflexion sur l’architecture qui outrepasse l’intérêt historique de ce bâtiment.En effet c’est le seul survivant des grands ouvrages singuliers de cet ingénieur qui a révolutionné le champ de la morphologie des structures en inventant les premières charpentes tridimensionnelles. Quasiment non documenté à ce jour, le garage administratif fait l’objet de cet article, qui le situe parmi les travaux et les recherches de Le Ricolais avant son départ pour les USA en 1951 et démontre les menaces qui pèsent sur sa survie.The French engineer Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977) is at the forefront of the inventors of spatial structures of the 20th Century. He practically built only models and ephemeral buildings, during his life shared between France and the USA. However, in May 2017, we found in Cameroon one of the twin large warehouses that he had erected in 1950 for the Ministry of Finances of the former french colony. Tracing the production of its projects and real-scale models, built in France for exhibitions or Post-War experimentations, this article introduces the « garage » of Yaounde among the theories and practices of the engineer, who was considered by his friend Louis Kahn and by a variety of French architects like Laprade, Pingusson, Prouvé, Huet, Chemetov, Emmerich and Mimram, like one of the most important source for their own architectural design and work. Thus, this only testimony existing in the world of a big wood and metal APLEX structure (a spatial concept patented by Le Ricolais) represents an important moment of the History of Construction and Architecture. One of its former student at Penn, the professor Peter McCleary, has reported in 1994 on the methods adopted by the engineer. He wrote: « Le Ricolais accepted the engineer's task of minimizing the potential energy of the loading and maximizing the strain energy of the structure. To reach this goal of "infinite span, zero weight" he built interminable comparisons of opposed solutions to a project, believing that deductions and propositions must prove themselves, and not be mere seduction or good intentions ; they must come to the facts. » The warehouse in Yaounde is the only survivor of these "facts" of Le Ricolais.The building, called « garage administratif », covers some 36 700 square feet (328 x 112 feet), over the River Mingoa, in the neighborhood of the Municipal Lake. Surprisingly, after 68 seasons of equatorial rainfall, after periods of violent winds, after some years of poor maintenance, its state of preservation is pretty good, whether its concrete base, the pieces of wood of its framework or the metal connecting elements. This testifies of the foreknowledge of its architectural design and of its high quality construction.Nevertheless, this amazing building is nowadays extremely threatened, for several reasons. The first is the total lack of interest or study on this garage during more than 67 years: we hope that after our research, this point will be no longer a problem. The second point is that these very past years, the twin-building near this one has been destroyed without any protest of anyone. The third is that there is a new big project for the urban redevelopment of the Mingoa Valley, in which the warehouse by Le Ricolais is totally unknown and neglected

Ouverture Transversale 5

International audienc