The French engineer Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977) is at the forefront of the inventors of spatial structures of the 20th Century. He practically built only models and ephemeral buildings, during his life shared between ...
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The French engineer Robert Le Ricolais (1894-1977) is at the forefront of the inventors of spatial structures of the 20th Century. He practically built only models and ephemeral buildings, during his life shared between France and the USA. However, in May 2017, we found in Cameroon one of the twin large warehouses that he had erected in 1950 for the Ministry of Finances of the former french colony. Tracing the production of its projects and real-scale models, built in France for exhibitions or Post-War experimentations, this article introduces the « garage » of Yaounde among the theories and practices of the engineer, who was considered by his friend Louis Kahn and by a variety of French architects like Laprade, Pingusson, Prouvé, Huet, Chemetov, Emmerich and Mimram, like one of the most important source for their own architectural design and work. Thus, this only testimony existing in the world of a big wood and metal APLEX structure (a spatial concept patented by Le Ricolais) represents an important moment of the History of Construction and Architecture. One of its former student at Penn, the professor Peter McCleary, has reported in 1994 on the methods adopted by the engineer. He wrote: « Le Ricolais accepted the engineer's task of minimizing the potential energy of the loading and maximizing the strain energy of the structure. To reach this goal of "infinite span, zero weight" he built interminable comparisons of opposed solutions to a project, believing that deductions and propositions must prove themselves, and not be mere seduction or good intentions ; they must come to the facts. » The warehouse in Yaounde is the only survivor of these "facts" of Le Ricolais.The building, called « garage administratif », covers some 36 700 square feet (328 x 112 feet), over the River Mingoa, in the neighborhood of the Municipal Lake. Surprisingly, after 68 seasons of equatorial rainfall, after periods of violent winds, after some years of poor maintenance, its state of preservation is pretty good, whether its concrete base, the pieces of wood of its framework or the metal connecting elements. This testifies of the foreknowledge of its architectural design and of its high quality construction.Nevertheless, this amazing building is nowadays extremely threatened, for several reasons. The first is the total lack of interest or study on this garage during more than 67 years: we hope that after our research, this point will be no longer a problem. The second point is that these very past years, the twin-building near this one has been destroyed without any protest of anyone. The third is that there is a new big project for the urban redevelopment of the Mingoa Valley, in which the warehouse by Le Ricolais is totally unknown and neglected.
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