(b Cancon, 14 May 1912; d Rignac, 24 July 1986). French architect. He studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and from 1944 to 1953, in association with René Egger, he worked mostly in Marseille, where he collaborated with Auguste Perret on the reconstruction of the Vieux Port district, and in Aix-en-Provence. He was then appointed Chief Architect to the city of Algiers and built several large-scale housing estates there (1953–7) including Diar el Mahçoul, Diar el Saada and Climat de France. In the late 1950s he built some even larger residential districts in the suburbs of Paris, such as Ensemble Buffalo (1955–8), Montrouge; the Cité du Point du Jour (1955–62), Boulogne; and 3500 housing units (1959–61) in the new town of Meudon-la-Forêt. In 1961 the Comptoir National du Logement, an architectural and engineering office he had established to build low-cost housing more efficiently, went bankrupt because of bad management, and he was sent to prison; there he wrote his memoirs and Les Pierres sauvages, a fictional account of the construction of the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet. He left France in 1965 and went to Algeria, where the government entrusted him with some large public commissions and the construction of more than 30 hotels for the Ministry of Tourism, including the Sidi Ferruch complex (1968). Pouillon returned to France in 1985 at the age of 73, ready to launch a new career, and had several projects under way at the time of his death including the Conservatoire de Musique, Paris. His architectural aesthetic was closer to Perret’s than to Le Corbusier’s: he preferred dressed stone to exposed reinforced concrete that weathered badly, and he applied the compositional principles of the Beaux-Arts without using overtly classical motifs. Shunned by the French press until the mid-1970s, he was later regarded as a precursor of architects such as Aldo Rossi or Léon Krier; his monumental yet contextual approach to massing and siting had considerable influence on younger French architects.

• Pouillon, Fernand
  • Algeria, §2: Architecture