«While so many works in history have disappeared, destroyed by the violence of the barbarians, it is ignorance today that watches for the works of the mind and destroys them with an even more ruthless blindness.», wrote Stéphane Gruet in the Artist and the Surveyor, work dedicated to the architect Pierre Debeaux (1925-2001). A judgment that resonates like a premonition, at a time when the Jacques-Vion fire station in Toulouse, this architect’s masterpiece, is threatened with destruction.
This is why we, collective for the recognition and protection of the work of Pierre Debeaux, supported by 200 signatory personalities from the world of architecture, arts and culture in France and abroad, are hiring Mrs. the Minister of Culture and Heritage to support the protection as historical monuments of this major creation of the second half of the 20th century.
Among other registered, labeled and listed achievements of this architect, this “Great Work”, located in downtown Toulouse, is in fact put up for sale to the highest bidder without protection against its demolition, even though a file registration as historical monuments is being examined by the Drac Occitanie. In October, the city of Toulouse launched a “sale by sealed tender” (auction with choice of the purchaser) of this set representing 1.2 hectares of building land. If the municipality mentions the procedure in progress, the candidate, in the absence of legally enforceable protection, may partially or even completely destroy it.
An architect in love with musical harmony
However, to undermine this exceptional work as a whole, and deeply original, would be an irreparable loss: in the complex and unprecedented response to the program of a fire station, the inventiveness of the structures and the powerful and subtle interplay of the volumes form a coherent whole whose elements are all harmoniously linked: the large monumental hall, the peristyle of the courtyard which opens onto the Charles-de-Fitte alleys, the main staircase, the chapel and the auditorium with their formwork vaults lost, the vaulted workshops, the exercise tower of extraordinary virtuosity, the gymnasium covered like the hall with a self-tensioning structural sheet and finally the accommodation, which must be brought up to standard in compliance with the architecture of Barracks.
Thus nothing in this composition escapes the rigor of the poetic and speculative thought of this architect enamored of musical harmony, to the point of engraving, on the right pillar at the entrance to the large hall, the geometric outline of the range diatonic. Through its inventiveness and formal exuberance, inspired and mastered by mathematics, this masterpiece is in fact comparable to the convent of La Tourette by Le Corbusier and the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis. But if Pierre Debeaux, a lover of the music of Varèse, insisted on the relationship between architecture and music, he saw himself above all, like Fernand Pouillon, as a medieval master builder, spending his life on the building site to settle his works with the workers, guided by the famous triad of Vitruvius: utility, stability, charm (“usefulness, solidity, beauty”).
The beauties of nature and solidarity of a human community
From the age of 26, on his first major project at the top of the Pic du Midi (of which he carried out 80% of the constructions), he experienced this rigorous necessity which engenders the economy of the beauties of nature, as well as the imperative solidarity of a human community working in this citadel 3,000 meters above the world. We also owe him the monument to the glory of the Resistance in Toulouse.
Son of his century rising above his time, Pierre Debeaux claimed the Caserne Jacques-Vion as his major work. Beyond bearing witness to an era engaged in liberating modernity, it therefore offers an irreplaceable example of a free and vigorous reinterpretation of the history of architecture.
Here, the vision in space and time of this architect enamored with mathematical beauty, whose genius was not unrelated to a certain madness, enthusiastic and discouraged more than one collaborator, while he fascinated his admirers who came to listen for hours to this erudite creator. We were.
Should we not promote rehabilitation and re-employment?
Twenty-two years after the death of Pierre Debeaux, at a time when the climate emergency prevents us from continuing to demolish in order to rebuild more and more, should we not imperatively promote sobriety, resilience, rehabilitation and reuse to a more “sustainable” evolution of our cities? By the way, this is not just any place, but a fire station. Now, wouldn’t 60 years of commitments and sacrifices in the service of the common good deserve, out of respect for this memory, that the integrity and public vocation of such a “monumental” place, in the first sense of the term, be preserved? ?
To sell without first ensuring the protection of this barely sixty-year-old masterpiece would not only reflect blindness and contempt for human genius, but also an ecological aberration, with a view to saving insignificant budget compared to the heritage of a city made up of the memory of all the centuries that it embodies.