Bergerac veils.

This building edges far more towards the PoMo than those we are used to publishing. But, for all the wilful decoration, it does have virtues: it helps integrate student life with that of the city, and its decorative screen gives each flat a sense of particular identity.

Bernard Saillol's most recent important work is an apartment block of 33 self-contained units for students, which also houses the Treasury Department of Bergerac and an apartment for the Treasurer. It was designed for the SAHLM de la Dordogne. A Societe Anonyme d'Habitations a Loyer Modere is a housing association for building social housing for rent or for sale. Very much more important and active than their British equivalents, the SAHLM in France concentrate on new building rather than on renovation, and receive most of their finance from the Caisse des Depots et Consignations (CDC), an autonomous state agency which acts as a public trustee, drawing its funds mainly from savings banks, and also from lawyers, social security and provident associations. It can make loans of up to 95 per cent of the net cost of rental housing developments, at low, subsidised rates of interest. The CDC has the right to examine the running and management of any HLM requesting a loan. Bernard Saillol has previously worked for the SAHLM de la Dordogne, having built a bizarre housing complex of 40 dwellings for that organisation at Montignac, 1986-87, each unit resembling the base of a fluted column.(1)

Several categories of people have a priority in gaining access to renting accommodation in an HLM; each applicant for a tenancy has to provide evidence of his or her previous domestic situation, previous income, and so on; guarantees have to be furnished of future means of support. The Maison des Jeunes described here is occupied by students at one or another of the various colleges in Bergerac, by apprentices to various trades, by single mothers, young couples and others.

Bernard Saillol, a local architect born in Belves in 1944, has worked for the most part in his native region, although he confesses with wry amusement that he has never been invited to build a second time in any of the 15 towns and villages within a radius of 20 kilometres of Bergerac where his work is to be seen. This is not because any of his clients are necessarily dissatisfied with the buildings they inhabit or work in; it is because in almost every case his style, in a deeply conservative area architecturally, has been the subject of controversy among the general public and in the local press on completion. Saillol works alone without assistance in his office, usually at night, and yet has achieved some success in international competitions: an honourable mention for his design for the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, and a jury mention for his submission for the Hotel du Conseil General des Bouches du Rhone a Marseille (both in 1990).

The Bergerac apartment block is the largest and one of the most successful examples of this architect's characteristically quirky and humorous approach to form, even if, like his other buildings (a primary school at Lalinde, 1989, for example) this is combined with a simplicity and economy of constructional technique and planning that does not in the least sacrifice practical function to the achievement of visual symbolism.

Using the most orthodox, well-tried constructional methods, he has realised a building with a light-hearted and fantastic presence in the rather humdrum town of Bergerac.

The apartment block is set on a flat, wedge-shaped parcel of land adjacent to an area of open flat ground which borders the route de Perigueux immediately to the east of the town centre, and which has no buildings of any distinction nearby. The parcel of land is being further developed by the SAHLM with blocks of flats of no particular interest by other architects. The building is essentially a reinforced concrete structure, a long rectangle 58 m x 11 m in plan, supported on slender, cylindrical concrete pilotis, beneath which are spaces for car parking.

It is comprised of two unequal four-storey blocks, one 33 m long, the other 21 m long, separated by a 5 metre wide gap. Both sides are terminated by end pavilions just under 16 m long. The left-hand block has a four-bay section some 17 m long, set back 1.50, and the right-hand one has a single bay measuring 4.3 m, similarly set back from the principal line of the facade.

In the centre of the 5 m gap are placed the lift tower, a free-standing element, and an exposed spiral staircase leading to a landing at each level. These provide the principal means of access, and are reached by a short flight of steps from the ground. At the back of the lift tower is a two-storey projection, 5 m wide, with a terrace on its roof, which houses a cafeteria.

An external gallery access to all floors, linked by other, straight staircases, runs across the principal facade, which faces east. The walkways on the galleries are prefabricated concrete slabs of a familiar standard industrial type, and the spiral staircase is also an off-the-peg product.

The three terminal bays of each of the two end blocks are covered by two gabled roofs, with a false one between them. The central sections have flat roofs masked by similar false gables matching the real ones in their dimensions.

The building contains one-roomed apartments of two types. In each end block there are six on each floor measuring 5 x 10.50 m, while there are five studios in the centre, recessed sections of the building measuring only 4 x 9 m.

Each of the larger types contains a wedge-shaped compartment placed along the partition wall between it and its neighbour (4.05 x 1.6 x 2.35 x 4 m), which is divided internally so as to enclose a bathroom with wc, hand basin and shower in one part and a general storage cupboard in the other; the smaller units have a compartment trapezoid in plan (3.3 x 2.5 x 1.6 x 4 m) similarly placed and divided.

The kitchen sink is in the living/dining end of the apartment, and in the larger units the end of the room furthest from the entrance of the gallery can be curtained off to make a bedroom wedge-shaped in plan, for a track may be fitted on the ceiling for this curtain, following the oblique line of the wall of the compartment, projected to the window wall. Most inhabitants have not bothered to curtain off the bedroom area.

A two-bedroomed apartment for the Treasurer has a large living-room across the axis of the building, and the Treasury itself has a conventional open plan with a couple of enclosed offices.

The metal brise-soleil and the galleries form a continuous flat surface across the principal facade, partially concealing the presence of two separate blocks and the set-back of the central sections of the building.

What turns the otherwise prosaic building into an object of fantasy is the treatment of this galvanised steel gallery structure.

The brise-soleil screening it is made up of bays measuring 5.2 m between uprights, which do not match the dimensions of any of the bays of the facade of the building itself. It is set parallel to the facade, but begins some 3 m to the right of the left-hand end of it, and continues some 3 m beyond the right-hand end. This injects a syncopated rhythm to the whole relationship between the intervals readable on the face of the building and those of its epidermis of aluminium and steel.

A remarkably free pictorial effect (fortuitously reminiscent of Paul Klee's Hammamet watercolours of 1914) is achieved with the sheets of pierced anodised aluminium of the brise-soleil. Each of its bays terminate at the roofline or well below it in a variety of shapes: some are equilateral triangles echoing the gables behind, others are cut into extravagant and irregular profiles evoking a cloudscape. All sorts of lesser motifs - stars, birds, hearts, a palm-tree, triangles and crescents have been introduced into the design as well, either as positive or negative shapes in the metal or the concrete gables themselves. Large open areas of the screen are also defined by planes of diagonally placed aluminium tubing.

The radio and television mast of the building is topped by a metal bird sculpture designed by the architect. With its smooth, glossy, rendered surfaces painted light grey and with glazed grey ceramic tiles on the pitched roofs, the elevation is given a remarkably translucent, iridescent sheen by the film of unpainted metal sheeting, which from a distance gives the curious illusion of being made of engraved glass.

The overall success of this building (the Treasurer and his staff express contentment with their accommodation, although some tenants complain of the absence of bicycle-racks, an important point to impecunious young students, some of poor sound insulation and others of draughts in winter - faults which, in France, are not necessarily those of the architect) is reinforced by the fact that it was brought in under its budget of 8.9 million francs and should prove to be of low maintenance cost in view of the underlying conventionality of its technical specification.

1 Tonka, Hubert, Bernard Saillol a Montignac, Collection Architecture et Cie, No 2, Paris, Editions du Demi-Cercle, 1990.