La cathédrale du Sacré-Cœur d’Oran (1898-1913)

Abstract

This article presents the results of one of the lines of research that we pursued in a thesis which attempted to address questions relating to the architecture of the churches built by the French in Algeria. Here we have confined ourselves to a number of questions concerning a religious edifice erected at Oran, the Sacré-Cœur cathedral: in the colonial context, was the architecture of this Romano-Byzantine church an adaptation of metropolitan models to the colony’s own architecture? What we seek here is to explain the process of construction of this cathedral, highlighting the various architectural modifications that the plans underwent, with reference to the people involved throughout the implementation of the project in order to identify the reasons for the choices that were eventually made. The paper also presents an analysis of various unedited original documents as a basis for approaching this hitherto unexplored Moorish project.

Keywords

• Algeria
• architecture
• colonial
• Oran
• religious heritage