Luoghi dell’identità: Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, Porte Océane e Front-de-mer Sud di Auguste Perret a Le Havre.

The post-war reconstruction of the city center of Le Havre by Auguste Perret seems to offer a significant contribution and constitute a paradigm for the construction of the city of our time. Faced with the present amorphous condition and boundless dispersion of the city in the open spaces of suburban area, the reconstruction of the atlantic city manifests an accomplished idea of form, evident in the definition of meaningful relationships with the story on one hand and nature on the other, an idea of the city whose civic value seems to be achieved through a research aimed to determine the identity of the collective places and to pursue the quality of living in the relationship between these and residence. Subject of this work are therefore the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, the Porte Océane and the Frontde- mer South, monumental places of the city, built through residential collective buildings reduced to the form of unitary objects. These places clearly refer to a wider urban memory, inside of which are reciprocally recomposed fragments of the historical city, more specifically of the Paris built through the experiences of Places Royales by Mansart and Gabriel, gardens by Le Nôtre, streets and boulevards by Percier and Fontaine, and at least the prefigurations of a turreted city of the future by Hénard. Compared to these evident references, the places of Le Havre have variations that cannot be reductively viewed as mere variations of a theme, but instead assume a more profound semantics refoundation. These in fact, significantly, no longer define themselves as exclusively internal to the urban form, but rather are placed along its border, where city and nature meet, where the civic world of the first one defines itself not as opposed to the second, but «open, synthetic, composed of different and interacting elements». It therefore seems possible to say that in its monumental places the city opens and chooses to represent itself in front of those 'fatti geografici' in which the project by Perret recognizes the identity of the place, and then translates in the architecture and in the spaces of the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville the steep slopes of the cliff of Bec-de-Caux, in those of the Porte Oceane the distant horizon of the ocean, and in the Front-de-mer South the other bank of the estuary the Seine, which constitute the «etymological roots of its 'fatti urbani'».