Ordered
to french architect Le Corbusier by the Salvation Army, the City
of Refuge, was built in 1933. Since then it shelters persons
in trouble and provides in them elementary needs. To accommodate,
to feed and try a reintegration by the work are three priorities
of the team socio-educational of the City which comes to support
the Salvationists in their mission.
The functional architecture of Le Corbusier aims, in a remarkable
organization, at the fact that each finds its place. The rationality
of the space contributes in itself to make respect certain order
in a city which wants autonomous, and in which all the problems
connected to the material survival can be handled. This autonomy
of the City can be differently lived by its inhabitants, on one
hand as a protection against the outside world become temporarily
hostile, on the other hand as a confinement, a sidelining. These
two feelings can coexist at individual's whose more or less temporary
difficulties taking care in a autonomous way do not imply necessarily
a taste for the life in community and the multiple constraints
which it requires from each of her members.
The building, which raises itself majestically in 12 of the street
Cantagrel, in the 13th district of Paris, contains 11 levels,
of its underground reserves until the plan bring down where from
we have a very vast sight on the East of Paris. The hall, accessible
to all, distributes two different parts in the superior floors:
the hotel business men and the hotel business women who shelter
300 persons in dormitories or in single rooms. The remarkable
situation of the kitchen, in the plot of land connecting two
streets of different levels, confers it a vertical sideboard
towards self-service restaurants, and a direct horizontal sideboard
on the street Chevaleret. So are facilitated the deliveries of
all which can be necessary to make more than 500 meals a day.
The basements of the building also contain all the workshops
necessary for its maintenance and for that of its inhabitants
(joiner's workshop, lingerie, electricity, plumbing etc.).
Finally,
the city opens on the outside world by means of its store, open
to the public, in which are put on sale any objects and furnitures
got back during emptying of cellars or apartments, which the
workers accommodated by the City make on simple demand with the
Salvation Army. Numerous clothes and knickknacks meditative or
brought to the store by their donors are also sold to it.
The
City was, in October, 1993, the theater of an exhibition intended
to mark the soixantenaire with it. The director, Mister Denis
Lebaillif, had asked a group of Norman artists and his guests,
to realize works in touch with the place and his function of
welcome of the homeless persons. It is in this context that I
realized six photos around the various functions of the city-
to accommodate, to feed, to to reinsert by the work. They consist
of collages elaborated with photos taken in the city during several
months, in which I stacked fragments of the plan of the building.
Reproduced and enlarged, they were fixed in panels Decaux settled
around the city, marking out the course of the public towards
this unusual place of exhibition...
