| This study takes as its subject the violent evacuation and dynamiting of a densely populated section in the historic center of the city of Marseille during the Second World War and the subsequent postwar reconstruction of this site. From its proposed transformation under Vichy by the architect Eugene Beaudouin, to its actual demolition by Nazi forces working in cooperation with local Vichy authorities, and throughout the long and contested trajectory of its postwar rebuilding, the history and physical structures of this quarter were variously and dramatically destroyed, ignored, recreated, and reconfigured. The long-term process of projecting and implementing proposals for this site by architects including Jacques Greber, Le Corbusier, Andre Leconte, Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Fernand Pouillon is examined through the analysis of architectural and urbanist rhetorics and representations in which particular visions of this place and its inhabitants took form. In this case, the reconstruction was orchestrated through the collapsing of the site's postwar present and its desired future onto its excavated and reimagined ancient past. Most importantly, the new buildings lining the waterfront were imagined to form a new facade and visage for Marseille and its projected postwar status as the capital of the Mediterranean and the critical link to France's increasingly contested colonial empire. As the reconstruction progressed, the distant moment of the city's legendary founding as a Phocaean port also became a critical reference point for the reconfigured quarter. The combined archeological and urbanist efforts undertaken as part of the reconstruction not only cleared away the ruins of the dynamiting but also effectively wiped away the physical traces of the war and the collaboration between Vichy and Nazi authorities that allowed for the evacuation and demolition in the first place at the same time that the majority of the quarter's former residents were permanently displaced by the very process of rebuilding. The mechanisms of erasure, reinscription and memory at work in the Vieux-Port quarter's transformation provide a model for understanding the role of reconstruction in architecture and the dynamics of place more broadly speaking. |
