Abstract:
This research work concerns the question of the aesthetics and the urban composition as
well as the values of global plastic art and the coherence that it can provide.
Placing the subject under a double point of view, at once urbanistic and historic, we were
interested to it in a more urban than architectural scale and more diachronic than episodic
events of the history of architecture and urban planning.
This, through the consultation of authors such as Pierre Riboulet, Françoise Choay, Michel
Ragon and Leonardo Benevolo, all interested at the same time to the town planning, the
architecture and their theories while trying to reconstitute their progress and the major
changes that took place.
We tried to «redraw» the evolution of the composition and the urban aesthetic as concerns
taken into account in the development of cities or city parts, to place both subjects chosen as
analysis - composition around the place of «La Bréche» in Constantine and the «Cour de la
Révolution» in Annaba - somewhere in this progress and to explain by the end through an
examination based on the appreciation of Plans, ground occupations and divisions, the
origins and the peculiarities of the compositions adopted while revealing the global urban
aesthetics and its specificity in each of both studied cases.
Globally, this work is an opportunity to retrieve interesting «manners» of planning partially
lost with the acquired processes of the modern town planning.
Algeria of colonial time was the one of the shock which followed the transplant of an
original, new urban model and fundamentally different from the precedents. Beyond the
violence and the indifference which the colonial architecture made live in the former
inheritances, we were interested in what made this new model theoretically, in the forms
and the layouts.
We thus present here, a compilation of information about the urban composition and the
aesthetics.
Treated and restored in the form of chronological evolution, it presents a specific analysis of
existing cases and a more global reflection on the history and the future of the aesthetics in
the field of the town planning and urban composition.
