Urban Landscape: Essay of Definition of an Algerian Vernacular Style among Students in Architecture

Abstract

This research is carried out with Algerian architecture students in a didactic framework which aims to demonstrate the process of defining architectural bias in the Algerian and, by extension, Mediterranean urban landscape. Many Algerian cities no longer have their character despite regional, climatic and socio-cultural particularities. The old urban fabrics are gradually transformed into precarious housing zones, concerned by a policy of resorption which disintegrates them, annihilating any historical anchoring in a style that one could qualify as Mediterranean or Algerian. It is in this environment of physical and intellectual impoverishment that we tried to understand the cognitive process that leads students to refer to this or that criterion as part of the expressionist vocabulary of Algerian architecture. Using an anchored theorizing approach, we have built up a corpus within the design learning workshop, thus resulting in a framework of formalization criteria of an architectural, spatial, colourimetric or sometimes functional order. Thus, some admit the local expression only for cultural or religious buildings while others do not conceive of an Algerian style without the presence of symbolic and often stylized or modernized artefacts, such as the trellis or the arcade. Attitudes are far from uniform and consensual.