1.1. Jean-Jacques Deluz: life and production

This article is based on a PhD thesis entitled Jean-Jacques Deluz (1930–2009): itinéraire d’un architecte suisse à Alger. Du tout au fragment (Bouzar, 2022). It focuses on the journey of an architect between Switzerland, Algeria and France, and was largely based on his personal archives deposited in 2014 at the Algiers Diocesan Study Centre,¹ known as the “Glycines”.

Deluz graduated from the Polytechnic School of the University of Lausanne (EPUL) in 1956. He moved to Algiers the same year to work for the Daure et Béri architecture agency, before joining the Agence du Plan (ADP) at the end of 1957. Trained in urban planning by Gérald Hanning (1919–1980) – the head of the ADP workshop – whom he succeeded in 1959, Deluz was directly confronted with the policies of the Plan de Constantine and the challenges of decolonisation. His experience has been highlighted in numerous publications (Deluz, 1988, 2001a, 2003, 2008, 2010), making him a key contributor to the urban and architectural history of Algiers in the twentieth-century. He remained in Algeria after Independence and turned, from 1962 onwards, to becoming an independent architect, a professional status he never abandoned.

Throughout his career, Deluz produced an impressive number of projects in a multitude of sectors: tourism and training facilities, the redevelopment of spaces, theatre scenography and housing; “paper architecture”² accounts for the largest proportion. The Sidi Bennour district, built as part of the wider Sidi Abdellah new urban area (ANSA)³ between 2000 and 2006, is a prime example of this. Alongside his architectural practice, Deluz also taught. From 1964 to 1988, he played a major role in training the first classes of Algerian architects. First at the National School of Architecture and Fine Arts (ENABA), where he influenced the drafting of the 1967 syllabus, then at the Polytechnic school of architecture and town planning (EPAU), where for two decades he played an active part in debates on reforms to the teaching of architecture.

When he died in April 2009, Deluz left behind a rich legacy on the history of architecture and urban planning in colonial and post-colonial Algeria, the study of which I am beginning for my thesis. It follows on from the research carried out on architects’ archives since the creation of the French Institute of Architecture (IFA) in 1980 (Mansion-Prud’homme, 2018). Considered by Kenneth Frampton (Frampton, 2007) as essential sources for the examination of architectural creations, architects’ monographs play a crucial role in the analysis of public policies, architectural movements and stylistic and technical innovations. The monographic framework allows the critical analysis of a plural production and the mechanisms that underlie it. Thus, the preponderance of analysis over any biographical considerations in understanding Deluz’s work was intended to distance reflection from the « biographical illusion » (Bourdieu, 1986) – even autobiographical – of which Giorgio Vasari’s Vite remains the model. Putting aside the « history-narrative » in favour of the « history-problem » (Aubenas et al., 2006) was therefore a necessary prerequisite from the outset.

1.2. Working on a private collection on Algerian soil: issues and challenges

Public administration archives provide little information about architecture and urban planning as an object or as a project. Architectural archives, on the other hand, help to reconstruct urban and architectural history, while offering a unique insight into the design process, the strategies implemented and the relationships with stakeholders. Studying them broadens our understanding of the evolution of cities and buildings, by exploring the ideas and influences that have shaped their development.

In Algeria, where the dispersed nature of sources from the colonial period is compounded by the difficulties of accessing archives and research areas in the post-independence period, architects’ archives are an essential resource. Such is the case with the archives of Georgette Cottin Euziol (1926–2004) held by the Bouches-du-Rhône departmental archives. The subject of Assia Samaï-Bouadjaja’s research (Samaï-Bouadjadja, 2019), they provide an insight into the social and industrial policies of Algeria in the first two decades of independence. Similarly, Xavier Dousson’s thesis (Dousson, 2010) on Jean Bossu (1912–1983) provides an insight into the reconstruction of Orléansville, a sub-prefecture destroyed by an earthquake in 1954. In Algeria, more than in France, these architects’ archives are « a point of passage for constructing a discourse on architecture or a discourse on architects » (Hottin, 2009).

The exclusive use of personal archives is likely to restrict the analysis to the discourse desired by the architect as reflected in the classification of their archives. In the case of Deluz, this restriction is more significant when we take into account the autobiographical dimension of his literature. Like many architects of his generation, he tried to organise his posterity during his lifetime. This preoccupation was heralded by the publication in 2001 of Alger. Chronique urbaine (Deluz, 2001a), the first autobiographical work written during his exile in Avignon,⁴ in which his personal history and that of the city of Algiers merge and cross-fertilise. This was followed by two books – Fantasmes et réalité. Réflexions sur l’architecture (Deluz, 2008) and Le tout et le fragment (Deluz, 2010) – published in the evening of his life, in which he sheds light on his thinking and his position. Finally, the attempt to classify his archives and his intention to entrust them to the Algiers Diocesan Study Centre are his last attempt at preservation.⁵

Reconstituting Deluz’s life in Algiers by extracting it from the autobiographical discourse was the first challenge of my PhD research. As the research progressed, the need to supplement the Deluz collection with other sources became apparent. Other public and private collections were consulted, and testimonies were collected from key figures in Deluz’s life. These additional sources permitted questioning the architect’s choices and influences, to contextualize his work and broaden the research perspective to include his artistic output. The second challenge of this study was to give an account of a very diverse corpus without smoothing out its rough edges. Through a critical and reasoned analysis of his work, the research set itself the objective of studying Deluz’s professional and intellectual career, in correlation with the clarification of his thinking. The aim was also to assess how his work fits into the history of architecture.

In addition to highlighting certain major segments of the Deluz collection, this research paper discusses the notion of corpus in the light of the objectives of monographic art-historical research into the filiations of Deluz’s work. Extracts from this corpus have been published and are available in Open Access on Nakala under the name Alger-Deluz (ACP01_MB).

2.1. The Deluz collection: history and classification

When the Glycines inherited the Deluz archives in 2014, the staff had to manage more than 2 m³ of documents and around a hundred linear metres of tracing paper on rolls. This archival material had previously been divided between his residences in Algiers and Rochefort-du-Gard in Avignon. With the exception of the tracings, which remain in their original state, the documents are now divided between 169 archive boxes (340 × 270 × 150 mm) (Figure 1).

The archives from his house of Bananiers street,⁶ to which Deluz devoted a chapter on Algiers. Chronique urbaine (2001b), account for 3/4 of the collection: documents from his agency, archive items, teaching programmes and research documentation. They also include personal correspondence, medical documents (including those relating to cats), invoices and photographs, like so many traces of a sometimes-tormented life attached to Algiers.

Some of this material has been carefully classified by Deluz himself, reflecting its importance to him. For example, his curricula vitae are arranged by year (boxes 1 and 1 bis); the Sidi Abdellah project⁷ was completely organised and referenced (boxes 3 to 14). The link between the Annassers project, on which he trained in town planning, and the Sidi Abdellah project that he conceived in the evening of his life, is apparent from the classification of the first part of the collection.

The documents relating to the Agence du Plan d’Alger (ADP) were not classified but simply collected. They include graphic documents (plans, reproductions, photographs) of the Annassers (Figure 2) satellite city project, the ADP’s flagship project, as well as reports; they are all grouped together in box no. 2.

Several months separate the acquisition of the « Bananiers » archives from that of « Rochefort-du-Gard ». The latter were moved to Algeria in two stages with the help of the Swiss and French embassies in Algiers; they were in complete disorder. The Rochefort archives concentrate most of his work in the office of architect Robert Hansberger, a friend and former ADP employee who employed him occasionally between 1994 and 2000. These are mainly urban redevelopment projects submitted – unsuccessfully – to competitions: the « Parvis République » and the northern zone of Avignon, the Flon train station and the « place du Château » in Lausanne. The archives also contain three architectural projects: the redevelopment of Mas de Jaisse and Villa Fabria in Avignon, and the construction of a detached private house in Cavaillon.

Various documents relating to the genesis of the ANSA project are also included, such as the master plan study begun at Rochefort-du-Gard (Figure 3). The sketches and photos of the sets and costumes that Deluz designed and produced for the plays « Bistrot » (1996) and « Les perroquets » (1999) complete the Rochefort archives.

3.1. Analysis of the archive fonds

Analysis of the Deluz archives was based on the criteria and standards set out in the manual for processing 19^th and 20^th century architectural archives (Manuel de Traitement Des Archives d’architecture Des XIXe et XXe Siècles, 2001); the inventory was drawn up using the “AToM” application. Michel Fayole, Sabrina Tenci and Agnès Thiry, documentalists at the Glycines, carried out the analysis under the supervision of the Scientific Council of the Deluz archive fond. Officially created at the time of the acquisition of the first batch of archives in 2014, the Council brings together those who initiated the transfer of the Jean-Jacques Deluz archives: his partner Magda Taroni, Father Guillaume Michel, at the time director of the Diocesan Study Centre, Nabila Chérif, architect and professor at the EPAU, the late Rachid Sidi Boumediene, urban sociologist, Karim Boukhenfouf and Larbi Merhoum, former students and collaborators of Deluz and myself, then working on my thesis project. As soon as the first batch was acquired, my task was to help contextualise the documents submitted for evaluation with a view to indexing them.

The Council’s first decision was to retain the entire archive. The assessment was based on the contextual information contained in the preserved documents. Accompanying the examination of the documents has enabled us to fuel our thinking from the outset and refine it as the assessments have progressed. An inventory of architectural and town-planning projects was drawn up as the documents were processed.⁸ The classification was based on that initiated by the architect before his death in two notebooks – one yellow (classification rating 01–12) and one black (classification rating 01–11) – which are also kept in the collection. The notebooks adapt the thematic filing system that the architect used to draw up his curriculum vitae. Arranged in A4 folders, the documents have been double-indexed (Figure 4). Numerical for themes: three basic digits that can be extended to a maximum of six digits to specify the field, type of document or project; by keyword: to locate the context, the place, the protagonists, the type of document, and so on.

The digital indexing of the Deluz archives chosen by the Glycines team adapts the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system used to classify the documentary holdings of the Diocesan Study Centre: the classes of the DDC are replaced by the categories of Deluz’s work (town planning, architecture, literature, etc.).

This indexation is explained by the structure of the Glycines, which is not an archive centre but a research library. As such, the Centre does not have the human, technical or logistical resources dedicated to conserving an archive collection. With the exception of the layers, which remain as they are due to a lack of funding, the rest of the archives are stored in 169 boxes, each containing an unequal number of folders as many sub-themes. There is no chronological classification.

3.2. A heterogeneous and incomplete collection

Although they are quantitatively important, the archives of Deluz’s architectural practice only cover the years after 1970, when he moved into his house in Bananiers street. The reasons for this are given by Deluz in Alger. Chronique urbaine (2001A). His first agency, built on the foundations of Hansberger’s and located in Serpaggi street, was burgled in 1966. In 1967, he moved into the offices of the former studio of the architect Charles-Henri Christofle in D’Alembert street; he was robbed of them in 1970 by a French colleague – whom he did not name – who took advantage of his absence to appropriate the premises and archives.

These archives are particularly important for the last ten years of the architect’s practice. At that time, his work focused on urban planning for the new towns of Sidi Abdellah, 40 km west of Algiers, Boughezoul in the highlands of Médéa, and Bouinan (Figure 5) in the wilaya (department) of Blida.

With Karim Boukhenfouf, a former student who became a close collaborator, Deluz designed and built social housing complexes in the Sidi Bennour district of Sidi Abdellah, in the Saïdani district of Réghaïa, and along Ahmed Boukhlef street in Birtouta (an Algerian suburb). Between architecture and town planning, these studies represent the most voluminous segment of the collection. They constitute an unparalleled source for understanding and assessing, through the prism of the undertaking led by Deluz, the economic models and regional and national development policies implemented at the time. By filling a documentary gap, these archives offer a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding of the dynamics that shaped the Algerian urban landscape at the dawn of the 21^st century.

The Deluz collection also includes some fifteen boxes containing documents relating to his eighteen years of teaching at EPAU, making up the second largest segment after that of Sidi Abdellah. These documents include teaching programmes and proposals, course materials, research documentation, students’ work, administrative correspondence and literature. In addition, there are the plans for the EPAU extension projects (Figure 6) that Deluz designed between 1973 and 1978.

In the absence of any archives accessible to the EPAU for the period 1970-1990, this segment of the collection opens up a new perspective on what underpinned the training of architects in Algeria in the 25 years following Independence. These archives make it possible to contribute to writing a history of architectural education in Algeria after Independence. The teaching documents reveal a didactic process underpinned by an intellection between the practice and teaching of architecture. Deluz’s attempts to reorientate the training of architects at EPAU provided an insight into the policies pursued by the Ministry of Higher Education in Algeria in the 1970s. However, the collection contains few traces of his time at ENABA between 1964 and 1969.

Box no. 2 deserves to be highlighted because of the presence of archive documents from the Algiers planning agency.⁹ These documents are the only sources available since the agency was dissolved. They owe their presence in the collection to the correspondence that Deluz exchanged between 1959 and 1962 with Pierre Dalloz, director of the ADP (Dalloz, 2012). At the time, Deluz had taken over from Hanning as head of the ADP’s urban planning workshop and was faced with the directives of the Plan de Constantine as part of the Annassers project (Landauer, 2001).¹⁰ This major housing development was intended to illustrate the implementation of the principles of the « Algiers Method » (Dalloz, 1958), inspired by Marcel Poëte’s « New Urbanism » and supported by Gaston Bardet (Bardet, 1945, 1948); an approach advocating close collaboration between the various players involved in urban development, and in which analysis and management take precedence over formalisation and regulation.

Copies of plans of the housing estate, photographs and reports provide a chronology of the project. Together with the correspondence and minutes of the ADP board of directors, these documents make it possible to reconstruct the history of the agency in detail, and to situate its players and their respective roles.

The absence of documents with a biographical dimension (letters, memoirs, family photographs, civil status records relating to relatives, etc.) is noteworthy, as are the traces of Deluz’s years of training at the EPUL. A notable feature of Deluz and his archive is the architect’s apparent silence about his family environment. There are few documents to link Deluz to his family or which describe the educational dynamics that may have influenced his career. This information, which is largely lacking, is added to the other sources that must be sought outside the archive.

3.3. Building the primary body of work

The constitution of the primary corpus depended on the availability of sources on the one hand, and on the need to detach oneself from the discourse initiated by the architect through the classification of his archives on the other. Following in the footsteps of Antoine Prost (1996), the archives were assembled into a corpus according to the criteria of contrastivity – with a view to highlighting correspondences and differences – and diachronicity – in order to analyse continuities and bifurcations in Deluz’s creation.

3.3.1. From the architect in his archives to thematic and chronological reindexing

The primary corpus was compiled in two stages. The first stage took place between 2014 and 2016, when the archives of the Deluz collection were examined. The pre-selected documents were then reclassified thematically in a database specific to the thesis, edited in Word and systematically cross-referenced to that of the Diocesan Study Centre (Figure 7). Locating these objects on the timeline of Deluz’s career took up the first year of the thesis (2017).

Figure 7 

Example of indexing a pre-selected document.

The second stage of selection was undertaken as soon as the thesis plan had been finalised, at which point the secondary body of work was broadly defined. At this stage, objects such as architectural and urban planning projects, teaching programmes and artistic works were identified according to their contribution to the study of Deluz’s work. These objects have been the subject of a new indexing (Figure 8) specific to the thesis, referring to their position in the overall demonstration. The construction of the secondary body of work was based on the same criteria.

Figure 8 

Example of the final indexing of the documents in the corpus according to the division of the thesis plan.

3.4. Building the secondary body of work to resituate autobiographical discourse

The secondary corpus includes sources from outside the Deluz collection: institutional archives, private archives, and the writings of authors who were interlocutors in the research. These sources are supplemented by material produced or brought to light by the researcher: artistic output, testimonies, a Diary¹¹ kept by Deluz in the evening of his life.¹² Confidential during his lifetime – deliberately so, according to the introduction to Alger. Chronique urbaine – it was undoubtedly destined to remain so, given the lack of material in the collection donated to the Glycines. Diversifying the sources has made filling the documentary gaps in the Deluz collection possible and opened up a variety of perspectives on the architect and his creative process.

3.4.1 Artistic production

On the back cover of Alger. Chronique urbaine, Deluz wrote: « I paint when the architecture lets me breathe: my painting is confidential, only a few friends know about it ». There is no trace of this work in his archives. Yet a study of Deluz’s artistic output is essential if we are to understand all the facets of his activity; a cross-analysis of his paintings, animated shorts, sculptures and installations enables us to explore the notion of ‘process’. An in-depth study of a singular work produced between 1970 and 1988, the « Cylinder » (Figure 9), is particularly heuristic in this respect. The work, of which a photographic print was the only instance in the Glycines collection, was the subject of an in-depth study that involved compiling a genesis folder¹³ to highlight the creative process.

Figure 9 

Deluz posing as a bard next to the cylinder. Picture taken by Christophe Deluz around 1988. JJD archive fonds. Algiers Diocesan Study Centre. Unclassified.

A facsimile of the cylinder (Figure 10) and its installation (Figure 11) as well as the artistic works preserved in Algiers were presented to the public for the first time at an exhibition organised in November 2019 at the Algiers Higher School of Fine-arts (ESBA).

Figure 10 

Main stages in the physical reconstruction of the cylinder. Algiers Higher School of Fine-arts, 2019.

Figure 11 

Reconstruction of the « cylinder » installation. Exhibition: « Deluz. L’œuvre d’une vie ». Algiers Higher School of Fine-arts, 7^th November 2019. Exhibition curator: Mourad Bouzar.

On 20^th April 2023, all of the architect’s artistic works, which had remained at the Bananiers since his death, were added to the Deluz collection by his partner Magda Taroni. A new exhibition of these forty or so paintings, sculptures and prints was organised on the same day at the Glycines under my curatorship. The description of these archives has taken on the classic form of a catalogue (Bouzar, 2023).¹⁴ They are now accessible in the same way as the rest of his archives. However, as with the tracings and plans, this new addition raises the issue of how to preserve these items.

4.1. A work in progress: the database of Deluz’s architectural projects

Based on the aforementioned body of primary and secondary sources, a database was created to document each individual architectural project, completed or not.¹⁷ The metadata for each column include:

• – Project location
• – Wilaya
• – French locality name
• – Arabic locality name
• – District
• – GPS coordinates
• – Project description
• – Project category (housing estate/administration/urban passage/equipment/etc.)
• – Project type (low-cost housing/low-standard indigenous housing/evolutionary housing/urban planning agency/post office/etc.)
• – Principal architect and collaborators
• – Name of principal architect
• – First name of principal architect
• – Name of collaborator
• – First name of collaborator
• – Implementation period
• – Project period
• – Archives
• – Main call number in the Deluz collection
• – Other Deluz call numbers
• – Other archives (Archives nationales de France, Archives nationales du monde du travail).
• – Miscellaneous additions (Chantiers magazine, etc.).

The information relating to the projects carried out by Jean-Jacques Deluz has been organised in such a way as to enable statistical and cartographic processing, as well as analysis of his networks of collaborators. These networks, like the activities of Jean-Jacques Deluz, can be used to count and locate designs and buildings from the late 1950s to the early 2000s.

References have also been made to other archive collections and to press articles. This database still needs to be linked to other databases: locating projects in the GeoNames geographic database,¹⁸ integration into the “Gazetier d’Alger” reference system¹⁹ or connection with the Agorha database.²⁰

This database is above all a prototyping tool, focused on collecting data on the architectural project. The project itself is the source of a large amount of information – typology, players, locations, timescales – and provides access to other types of archives, from those of the architect to those of the administrative authorities, via documents produced by funding bodies.

4.2 Research perspectives

The Glycines archive fonds provides detailed understanding of Deluz’s career, his creative process and his autobiographical discourse. A large amount of additional material has made it possible to avoid confining the biographer to the portrait he drew of himself or that he left in his archives. The archival fate of the documents produced and collected by Deluz has been strongly conditioned by the life of this Swiss citizen caught up successively in the twilight of French colonisation, the construction of an independent Algeria and the exile that followed the civil war of the 1990s. It has also been shaped by the variety of his creative practices and documentary media (paper, tracing, canvas, digital, etc.).

Correspondence, photographs and testimonials enable us to reconstruct his professional network, identify the players involved, understand the dynamics of collaboration and identify the intellectual influences that shaped his work. This paves the way for research into the interactions between Deluz and other players on the architectural scene of his time, helping us to grasp the richness of the exchanges that fuelled his creative output.

The collection is also of vital importance for thinking about the different dynamics of the late 1950s to the present day. By filling the gaps left by the dissemination, destruction or inaccessibility of administrative archives, they offer a valuable alternative for studying the urban, economic and social policies implemented in a context of decolonisation. In the aftermath of Independence, these reflexive fields extend to the teaching of architecture, questioning the evolution of models and the dynamics of their hybridisation. Another relevant avenue is the study of urban, economic and social policies in Algeria at the dawn of the twenty-first century, in which Deluz collaborated directly in the context of new town projects such as Sidi Abdellah near Algiers.

All in all, the Deluzian body of work that I have been able to compile has been leafed through in a variety of ways: archives transferred from two of his homes and donated to a library; written and oral fragments gleaned from various places; singular and multiple classification and indexing, by librarians and by myself. It is also the basis for reconstructions, such as the impressive Cylindre, and for databases under construction, such as that on Deluz’s architectural projects. All these factors make the archives of an architect active in Algeria in the second half of the twentieth century so unique not only for the study of his professional and artistic career, but also for the study of the city of Algiers and its urban planning history.