About

The work of French architect Fernand Pouillon (1912–1986) is significant yet understudied. Beyond his better-known housing projects, Pouillon utilized different media available to architects—drawing, building, and writing—in works that engage with the question of historical time. Pouillon’s surveys of Aix-en-Provence (1953), his unstudied restoration of Belcastel (1964–1975), and his literary contributions—novel, (1964), memoir (1968)—illustrate an articulated approach to architecture beyond just building to include creative writing. Pouillon’s work and dilemmas as a practitioner have much to teach us today about architecture's relationship to 'the past', specifically in relation to conservation and heritage. 

Although ‘the past’ in architecture often raises technical questions of restoration and preservation, it more fundamentally challenges our understanding of history, memory, and time itself—a relationship mostly sidelined in the main narrative of Modernism (Koselleck and Tribe, 2005). Arguably, history is not merely past but always present in a latent or fragmented form (Vesely, 2004), persisting continuously through traces (Ricœur, 1955; 1984). This view of historical time as an elusive, poetic idea bound to memory and narratives lends itself to exploration through multiple media.

Through primary research of Pouillon’s work, including extensive unpublished archival material, interpreted through primary philosophical writings from hermeneutics phenomenology, this project investigates the historical dimension of architecture as living memory. This perspective suggests that architecture is not merely a static record of the past but a medium through which we continuously re-draw, re-build, and re-write our understanding of history. The aim is twofold: to bring to light hereto unknown material on this important architect and highlight his contribution to our approach to the historic built environment; and to contribute to contemporary debates on architectural practice understood as poetic dialogue, allowing us to experience the past as an ongoing dimension of the present.