Houari Boumedienne Agricultural Village

More than 10 years after Algeria gained independence, President Houari Boumediene launched a project to construct 1000 agricultural socialist villages. The construction of these villages was to improve the precarious living conditions of the fellahs who were still living on the margins of society, disseminated over a vast rural territory and evolving on the edge of national activity. The intention was to foster the emergence of villages throughout the countryside to house and allow those who made a living from the land to produce and remain together. This implied a new, lasting way of life for such populations—and thus, more than just housing, the importation of spaces and activities necessary for agricultural operations, from education to individual healthcare, and community life.

While the proposed dwellings were no longer temporary or demountable, the Taller de Arquitectura remained faithful to nomadic tradition and worked to create an architecture intimately linked to the region’s vernacular traditions, using its materials and reproducing the unique organisation of living spaces anchored in Algerian culture. The issue was to offer the fellahs a decent life, close to the lands they cultivated, and the modern means of working those lands. The Soviet model of socialism certainly inspired the construction of such villages, but the region’s local identity and social customs had to be integrated so the project would succeed and endure. The experiment in establishing these villages was developed away from Western moral and architectural codes, from which the Algerian people wanted to free themselves, wishing to make a fresh start after a long period of colonial rule characterised by violence and servitude.

In this context, the Taller de Arquitectura constructed an agricultural village in the southeast of the country. The composition of an urban nucleus based on the combination of single-family dwellings offered infinite possibilities, which had to be limited and serialised in order to keep the cost of the operation as low as possible. The geometric forms chosen, drawn from Arabic and Mediterranean traditions, made for a first grouping of two or three dwellings laid out around a courtyard to compose a block. A grouping of several blocks composed a neighbourhood, and several neighbourhoods a town, with the proportion of built space to open public space kept constant. A large central square, as is found in all Arab towns, serves as the marketplace and meeting place, a setting for festivities and spectacles, and is the vital axis articulating the town.