It started as a delightful accident. Whilst making his rounds, a French postman tripped over an unusual limestone that looked like ripples. He admired its strange shape so much that he kept it in his pocket to bring home. That was the beginning of thirty-three years of an obsession for Ferdinand Cheval. He would continue to collect more stones; first in his pocket, then a basket and eventually a wheelbarrow. With the stones, he began constructing a “Temple of Nature”, drawing on visions he received in his dreams. Although ridiculed, he clocked in a total of 65,000 hours to construct his “Ideal Palace”.
Following the footsteps of Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso, I visited the Ideal Palace a few years ago. In the otherwise sleepy town, the Palace seemed to have sapped all the energy and exuberance the land had to offer. There were traces of Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat and Egyptian temples and reminded me of the Sagrada Familia. Curiously, Cheval started his masterpiece in 1879, three years prior to Sagrada’s start. It was exuberant and chaotic, but also incredibly energetic and inspiring. It’s obviously made by an amateur, but its scale makes question who, how and why anyone would embark on such a project. In one corner, the spontaneous self-taught architect-artist-builder inscribed an assertive statement: “The work of one man.”
Cheval’s may be a one-off tale, but it made me reflect on self-building and where it stands in today’s landscape. Many architects would confess it is an aspiration to build by hand the designs they draw. In the architectural canon, Walter Segal is the first to come to mind. Segal infamously sparked a self-build movement in the 1970s, but unlike Cheval’s creative epiphany, Segal’s was a story of things falling in place over time.
Segal spent a good portion of his childhood in an anarchist commune in the Swiss Alps, sheltering from the first world war. There, he met the likes of Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the architect Rudolf Steiner. Half a century later, Segal was settled in London when he was widowed. When he remarried more than ten years later, they had to replace their Victorian house to accommodate a larger family. Out of necessity, Segal constructed a temporary dwelling in his garden for the family to live in during the works. It took two weeks to build and cost £800 at the time.
Segal’s “temporary” structure was built using readily available, inexpensive materials and remained standing for over 50 years. Learning from this, he developed a self-build system which reduced the need for tradesmen and customisation. Driven by practicality rather than an aesthetic philosophy, the dwellings lacked ornamentation and fancy finishes. What brought Segal’s system to the mainstream was a group of progressive councillors at a South London borough who dedicated land for houses to be built using Segal’s principles. This experiment paved the way for a new kind of affordable homeownership. Today, there are more than 200 Segal buildings in the UK.
On the self-build spectrum, Cheval and Segal may stand on opposing ends. One built out of an almost divine calling - an enduring crazed obsession. The other was serendipitous, driven by circumstance than by design. But both are tales that illustrate an architecture that is autonomous, handmade and empowering.