City of Towers. The Auguste Perret project for Amiens

In the articulated context of French post-war reconstruction, Perret’s experience occupies a singular position. In the complexity of the questions posed by the scenario of the bombed cities, his work, more than within a more widespread “conception of urbanism understood as embellissement, implemented by reconstructing and transforming the city according to the image of the ancient one”, seems to define itself in the will to coherently rethink the form of territories and cities with respect to one’s own time. Independently of the necessities that in 1941 had determined the promulgation of the Charte de l’architecte reconsturcteur, the answer given by Perret shows its validity within a more general reality originated by the growth of cities and the need to “create the past” through an analogical procedure that sees a reinterpretation of the most profound reasons of the tradition of French cities. The reconstruction of Place Alphonse Fiquet in Amiens does not therefore result in the revival of a particular image of the city of Picardy, as in the invention of forms that manifest a link and a belonging to a wider cultural world, which is that of the northern French cities. So this is the reason that explains the founding choice, in the project for the square, to place a beffroi where it had never been, as if it had always been there, and to coherently and historically rethink the urban form within the relationship between the civic tower and the Gothic cathedral.