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. This building, through its name, architecture as well as history, is intimately linked to the commissioning family: Alexandre Sterckeman, inventor of the caravans of the same name, was at the origin of the first prototype of this kind in 1946, which very quickly competed with English models. He passed down his passion to his son Christian, who developed the company in the French market and greatly contributed to the drawing power of the Seclin industrial zone - today Unexpo - a nearby town. It was indeed the latter who first commissioned the French architect Paul Chemetov in the 1960s to construct a building to house his industrial company in Seclin.
Subsequently, the two men formed a strong friendship, thereby leading quite naturally to Paul Chemetov building the Sterckeman house in Avelin in 1972. '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. Such was the future of the building, which today, belongs to Christian Sterckeman's widow.
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.