Press Architecture: Uncategorized Buildings in Algeria (1958-1962)

Samia Henni is an architect. She graduated from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In the fifties, whilst Western powers were attempting to reconstruct their shattered cities and recover from WWII, a war of national liberation broke out in Algeria (1954-62) and simultaneously ushered in an unprecedented era of “modern” dwellings. At this event architect and researcher Samia Henni will discuss the significance of Plan de Constantine, a national socio-economic modernization plan announced by General Charles de Gaulle in Constantine in October 1958, in which thousands of dwellings were built and a slew of terminologies were introduced such as: Modern Housing (Habitat Moderne), Muslim Housing (Habitat Musulman), Normal Housing (Habitat Normal), One Million Housing (Logement Million), One Thousand Villages (Mille Villages).

How was architecture – more specifically that of dwellings – adapted to the process of modernization without the condition of modernity? How was the building industry instrumentalised to wage a socio-economic war of “pacification”? To which modernism does the architecture of the Plan de Constantine belong?

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