10 kilometres southeast of Lille, the Sterckeman house by the architect Paul Chemetov, nestled withi

10 kilometres southeast of Lille, the Sterckeman house by the architect Paul Chemetov, nestled within a tree-filled garden and surrounded by pastures. Built out of a 5-tonne Corten steel structure and tarmacked breezeblocks in the middle of its garden, the raised black block punctuated with large picture windows, which comprises this singular habitation, is listed on the supplementary inventory for historical monuments. Towards 1970, Christian Sterckeman asked Paul Chemetov, a young architect, to build a house on the Pévèle plain. They met several months earlier for an industrial and commercial building project for the sale and distribution of caravans under the framework of his professional activity. 'Living can be camping. A way of settling down without anchoring, of taking hold without taking root'. The construction was therefore designed as a prototype for an economical, reproducible, working-class model typical of its time.
Perched on stilts, with its white diagonal triangulation bars, its large skydome windows and plumbing pipe guardrails, the Sterckeman house stands in the middle of a tree-filled garden surrounded by pastures. Everything is within sight.
This is, of course, an architectural decision firmly inscribed in the landscape, as Paul Chemetov notes. Winner of the Grand Prix de l'Architecture in 1980, who at one point declared, 'architecture is a moral construct', he designed several emblematic Parisian buildings like the Ministry of Finances in 1989. For him, the traces of the construction and the experience of the materials mattered: 'Here and now the courage is to build. Let's leave fashion to the milliners and graphics to the graphic designers'. The Sterckeman house, with its concrete, rough breezeblock walls, exposed bricks and red metal framework, is basically a manifesto in action: that of Paul Chemetov's societal engagement as a protagonist for the recognition of metallic structures.