The Dialogue Between Social Modernization

and Postwar Modernist Housing Architecture in Paris

Francisca Mejia
 Paris was hailed “The Capital City of the 19th Century”, but after World War II besieged

it, the city necessitated a regeneration that would catapult its urban form and fabric to what it is

today. Post-war Paris is particularly interesting, with a new republic that envisioned an entirely

different Paris as new issues within society sprung forth in the wake of war and destruction.

(Bertrand Dorléac, 2009) The people’s sensibilities were transformed, especially with respect to

the space and environment they used and inhabited by the massive shortage in housing, influx of

immigrants, and the influence of Americanization that presented themselves to the capital known

for its grandeur and delicacy. (Bertrand Dorléac, 2009) Of such sensibilities, architectural styles

and the standards of building and planning were looked upon as instructive because they

primarily equip people’s way of living and, more definitively, impinge on their quality of life. As

the Art Nouveau has made a new culture of art and architecture in Paris to provide individuality

and movement at a time influenced by banal neoclassicist principles, and Art Deco amidst the

booming and vibrant industrialization in search for the modern in the indulgent, so Postwar

Modernism did for the French capital after the war and three decades on. (Golan, 1995) Thus,

social modernization was in the reins of modernist ideals, concretized by architecture and

planning. (Cupers, 2014)

Looking at the history of Parisian urbanism and spatial transformations, from

Haussman’s military urban planning, the determined construction of ornamental structures and

grand landmarks (Olsen, 1986), all the way to the Paris of today, with its steady subservience to

preserving the incongruous ambience of forward-looking antiquity, the expected changeless

progression of such a delightful capital of the developed western world was muddled when war
when stepped in. Then on, mod1ern architecture served as the tool for France’s total
2
modernization. The contemporary discipline of urban planning well may have been born in

postwar Paris, when after World War II a revolution in the field of architecture took place.

Architects and planners boldly felt themselves positively responsible for the creation of the

perfect environment for the people. (Cupers, 2014) In 1922, Le Corbusier famously created a

plan for Paris entitled Plan Voisin in the publication “A Contemporary City of Three Million

People”. Although he was unable to find patrons to support and realize his ideas until the 40s,

many postwar architects and planners looked to the principles he laid out, remarkably his

“skyscraper in the park” that indeed reinvented the global urban environment. (Jeanneret, 1929)

From 1946 onwards, the Parisian government’s role was redefined to serve these new

ideals, thus the taming of excess from previous decades towards social modernization beginning

with the domestic setting, by way of architecture ––exhibited by completed housing complexes

in the 1960s––through a more functionalist approach to spatial design, the reinvention of form

and shape for housing structures, and the choice and technology of materials used for them. And

as with all state-led endeavors, these were met with as much criticism as applause.

Consequent to the war, soldiers, refugees, and those who fled and returned to Paris were

utterly shocked at the human condition that resulted. When one’s environment has been

completely changed, moreover destroyed, how would life thus be continued? How does one

function in a society that was reduced to rubble? (Wakeman, 2009) What would be soon built to

1
Cupers, Kenny. "The Social Project". Places Journal, 2014. doi:10.22269/140402.

2
provide answers to such questions was a contrast the inquirers themselves perhaps requested.

And then, there was the question of home. What is home now? After 5 years of living within

barracks, on little to no food supply, housing that lacked amenity and leisure, how and where

must the Parisian live now? (Picon-Lefebvre, 2003) Many governments, not just in France,

called for a new order in planning and design. Vivaine Claude expounds in her book Faire la

ville. Les métiers de l'urbanisme au XXe siècle or, in english, Making the City: The trades of

urban planning in the 20th Century that after WWI, the direction towards postwar modernism

was led by social and political movements that regarded functionalism as a derivative of

socialism and humanism, in which buildings and shelter be designed around a rationale of

functionality and practicality, and that architecture as the field that could promote and make a

physically better environment for humans, or even a perfect world. (Claude, 2006)

Figure 1. Expansion of the Paris

 Such began when the avante-garde CIAM (Congres international d’architecture modern,

founded by the likes of Le Corbusier) of the 1920s turned into a postwar association of architects

that finally ruminated on the everyday as a vital consideration in architecture, expanding

functionalism to incorporate them into design principles. In France, the national government was

a driver of this; wherein the new focus in planning was on the user, causing to uplift the

collaboration of disciplines, particularly the social sciences with law and architecture, and

recreating the discipline of architecture and its very purpose. (Cupers, 2014) Thus, an expansion

of Paris (See Figure 1) was determined, with social and affordable housing distributed in

banlieues (suburbs) and villes nouvelles (new towns) at the forefront. There were 5 designated

new towns (Cergy-Pornoise, Évry, Marne-la-Vallee, Melun-Senart, and Saint Quentil), and other

expanded suburbs like that of La Defense, Bobigny, and Créteil, which were fully established by

1966. In these suburbs of Paris, came about some of the best (or worst) experimental

architectural solutions to the Parisian housing crisis. These sites were planned strategically so for

easy access to and from Paris with new transport links planned to be built, but developments

were also assigned to different architects and planners who may or may not have discussed the

spatial relationships of these developments together. Enter the grands ensembles (large housing

complexes) and the aspirations of architectural visions that came with them. (Bataille, 2002)

A particular development in Bobigny, an expanded suburb in northeastern Paris, is La

Cité de L’Abreuvoir (1969) by architects Émile Aillaud and Edouard Vaillant. Still standing and

inhabited, Aillaud and Vaillant’s post-war housing project is made up of 11-storey tower blocks

that are surrounded by curvilinear 4-storey perimeter buildings with apartment buildings

accessible by stairway from the outer side. There is an existing public transport system of buses
that 3run along streets from where local residents and the tenants of the apartments use to enter

the structure, over open spaces that connect to the marketplace. Although residents of the

complex can use these open spaces as a thoroughfare, only the structures have visual access to

the amenity. What makes Bobigny different from other new towns is its amenities and regard for

open space. Marketed for working class tenants, the site plan for L’Abreuvoir provided much

green space (See Figure 2-3), conveniently located local stores, community services and easily

accessible stations to the train. There was an emphasis on communal space in such a

development wherein the architectural character of the housing structures themselves could not

have facilitated or did not encourage within its plain, tight modernist halls and walls. (Downie,

1972)

Figure 2-3. La Cité de L’Abreuvoir

Bataille, Philippe, and Pierre Signoles. Recomposition Des Territoires Et Reconstruction Du Lien Social ? De La
Production De Lespace Dans Les Zones Prioritaires: Grands Ensembles Et ZUP. 2002.
 The new towns and the large housing projects like La Cité de L’Abreuvoir proffered a

solution for the housing crisis as well as served the expected population boom after the war.

Since the developments were mostly born ex nihilo, the focus on creating connections within the

new living spaces and how Parisians would access them from the city center was a primary

challenge. The working class, the immigrants, and their families were provided communities that

were close to the city centers. American critic Ada Huxtable’s New York Times critique entitled

Architecture Cold Comfort: The New French Towns of Bobigny is that it was “an arbitrary and

sometimes bleak sampling of architectural mannerisms saved by a good plan and landscaping.”

(Huxtable, 1978) Highlighted there was the notion that Parisians would feel like they were

moving to another planet (to the moon to be more exact) as they relocated, redounding the

developments as cold and unfriendly spaces, even disconnected. The feeling with regard to these

complexes also resounded in Rosemary Wakeman’s The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958.

Wakeman explores and expounds on the rich quality of public space that teemed during the years

after the war, which could be a critique of how poor the housing situation was. She mentions in

her book, “The city’s streets, squares, and ceremonial places became heightened metaphorical

objects precisely because of the massive disruption of memory and ritual and their sweeping

replacement by alien constructions. “ (Wakeman, 2009) Alien constructions that allude to the

impervious characteristics of what should have felt like home for people and the attempts of

planners to create successful communal spaces within the grands ensembles proved of unable to

reach its objectives. (See Figure 4) 4

Wakeman, Rosemary. The Heroic City. Paris, 1945-1958, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
 Figure 4. Plans for banlieues with green open spaces.

Looking in at a more architectural level, there were also the new ideas of form and

materials. These most essential layers to be integrated in a development in order to achieve the

full effect of the concept of simplicity, austerity… modernity. Most representational of postwar

modern architecture and sensibilities are rigid geometric forms and shapes, and the increased

utility of concrete and glass. Modularity and even diagonality were concepts put into practice in

the architecture that sought to achieve modernist utopian objectives. Thus, this preference of a

modular design principle has led to a reshaping of modern structures in postwar Paris, especially

in the expanded areas of the banlieues. Two housing projects of architect Jean Renaudie and the

housing complex designed by Gerard Grandval in Créteil. in the late 1960s exhibit the

convergence of function, form, and material; EDF housing and the Jean-Baptiste Clément

Housing complex that are both located in Ivry-Sur-Seine and Les Choux de Créteil in Créteil.
 Located in Ivry-Sur-Seine, a southern suburb of greater Paris, and meant to serve office

employees of the then recently nationalized utility company Electricity de France (EDF), the

EDF housing complex by Jean Renaudie and his firm Atelier de Montrouge built in 1968

exemplify modularity with a building unit containing an interlocked L-shaped module rotated at

right angles four times, there is no preferred orientation and views for the entire building, but the

different rooms within the structure face away from one another and into different directions.

This EDF housing complex is listed in the Supplementary Inventory of Historic Monuments.

Vacated for more than a decade, it is proposed to be will be renovated as part of the Ivry-

Confluences urban planning program. (Scalbert, 2004)

Figure 5-6. EDF Housing Complex

Geometric forms in housing structures did not only dictate simplicity, but also flexibility.

Since housing complexes were meant to serve a greater population, buildings with more storeys

were preferred, thus modular and rigid polygons that could be easily stacked. Building height

also reflected the utopian ideal of modernity, which presumably stemmed from Le Corbusier’s

Plan Voisin. Jean-Baptiste Clément Housing, another of Jean Renaudie’s works (along with

Renee Gailhoustet) in the Ivry-Sur-Seine area plays in contrast with the EDF complex, having a
more distinct and complex form. Founded on a group of triangles layered in 3 dimensions that

spawns open courtyard spaces and a stair-like progression from the street through a commercial

arcade in the ground floor to the upper levels, which were residential in use. Each lodging unit in

this complex holds an outdoor balcony and, even roof garden, whose exteriors abut into other

units. Dutch architect from TU Delft Anton Zoetmulder notes of this structure in his reflection on

Jean Renaudie, “Whatever its rules of organization are, they can be infinitely

extended and varied to account for local conditions yet still produce an identifiable whole. It’s

not very often you’ll see anyone attempt designing a three-dimensional amorphous matrix for

mixed-use living.” This comment was in relation to Dutch structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s

that emphasizes social use of spaces and creating social links between the inhabitants of the

space as the main goal of the movement. The Jean-Baptiste Housing project catapulted architect

Jean Renaudie into the international scene, by demonstrating the possibilities of an alternative

housing architecture, steering away from the stolid forms of cubes and rectangles that are more

common that not associated with social and affordable housing. (Zoetmulder, 2014)

Figure 7. Jean-Baptiste Clément Housing

 Figure 8-9. Jean-Baptiste Clément Housing

Rigid and machine-like were the descriptors of the lives of the citizens that inhabited

postwar modernist structures and considered them as homes. As the rich Americans fled their

Victorian homes, so did the wealthy Parisians whose former homes, gaudy and ornamental

replaced them into homes. (Picon-Lefebvre, 2003) Even as the field of architecture was poised to

serve the nation with these more affordable housing complexes (Renaudie’s EDF), it still aspired
5
and provided its regular services to those architects can provide some artful notions to, even in

the midst of reconstruction, like that of Renaudie’s Jean-Baptiste Clément Housing. A

remarkable commentary on this issue in French art and media was some of director Jacques

Tati’s films; particularly Mon Oncle (1958) whose characters Mr. and Mrs. Arpel live in a

modern geometric house called Villa Arpel located within one of the wealthier banlieues of

Paris. Archdaily writer, David Portilla describes the characters as “entrenched in a machine-like

existence of work, fixed gender roles, and the acquisition of status through possessions and

conspicuous display… Each element of Villa Arpel is representational rather than functional, an

environment completely hostile to the comfort of its occupants.” (Portilla, 2012) Therein lies the

question of postwar modern architecture’s goals as functional to be misconstrued when

translation by architects and then the interpretation of the users become misaligned. (Cupers,

2014)

As if coming full circle from Haussman’s military planning in the 1850s, the 1950s was

also reordered by in militarized sense of construction as supplies in materials were scarce.

Prefabricated materials for buildings were not only the latest trend, symptomatic of the war’s

military needs, but of the purpose intended for more economical and faster methods of

construction. Some architects became more creative and looked to another burgeoning

architectural movement called postwar brutalism. Postwar brutalism in Paris found itself in the

form of housing, government and school buildings, unlike in other European cities wherein they

also built cultural institutional structures with the style. The style expanded with the expansion of

building from the Paris historic and city core. Critic Reyner Banham proclaimed that

Banham, Reyner. “The New Brutalism” 27 July 2010 Architectural Review,

“[Brutalism] aligns itself with the material honesty of the earlier work of Le Corbusier and

August Perret, and incorporates within it both the French term le béton brut (raw concrete) and

the expressionistic tendencies of art brut. Many of the Parisian Brutalists experimented with the

structural and aesthetic properties of concrete, as the most affordable construction material

available in postwar reconstruction.” (Banham, 2010)

Figure 10-11. Les Choux de Créteil

On the opposite side of Bobigny, is Créteil, in southeastern Paris, wherein housing

developments were distinctive in their modernist approach that touched on the aforementioned

style of postwar brutalism. Although functionalist in principle, some housing structures would

take organic forms (See Figure 10-11), for example that of Gérard Grandval’s Les Choux de

Créteil (1969-1974), a complex of ten cylindrical 15-storey residential buildings (4 apartments

on each floor – two 3-bedroom apartments and two 2-bedroom apartments) whose form has

made it a characterizing feature of the whole suburb itself. (See Figure 12-13) Citizens dubbed

the structures as “cabbages” with their petal-like shapes of the balconies; Grandval meant it as a
break to the monotony of the rigid structures that teemed in the area in an interview with Le

Parisien. The site was a former garden market, which since 1860 was one of the main centers of

vegetable production of Paris: the Sauerkraut Benoist, the largest sauerkraut factory of the Paris

region settled there. Grandval was probably not unaware of the past of this part of the city when

he proposed his project.

Figure 12-13. Les Choux de Créteil

One of Grandval’s buildings in the complex is a 6-storey cylindrical apartment block

(renovated in 2014), which had a courtyard and a double-loaded corridor, which followed the

shape of the building. Although the shape was considered impractical, the apartment units had a

most profound cadence to them, oriented around a single point of courtyard meant to be the

residential building’s main communal space. Although, Créteil was fulminated against as

containing buildings that had too loud a personality (consider Grandval’s Les Choux), which

as American critic Ada Huxtable noted had “little to do with people, purpose or setting”

(Huxtable, 1978), the new town and its remarkable brutalist style housing buildings, sustained

a new generation of progressive architects that made possible a fresh range of

“experimentations with architectural form and social program.” (Wilson, 2017) Robin Wilson,

editor of the Brutalist Paris Map that sought to laud and defend these structures, including

Grandval’s, further states that these areas make a particular impact on the history of urbanity

that would spark “new municipal identities and postwar communities.“ (Wilson, 2017)

A lesson to be earned in postwar modernist housing in Paris is that, in spite of what could

have ensued in the in-betweens of the processes done by the government and the architects,

notwithstanding possible conflicts of interests, that in the aftermath of a cataclysm as the world

wars have shown, the urban center was redefined and was seen as vital to be planned in order for

humanity to survive. Urban areas are the problematic platforms with which solutions are

creatively made. In experimentation in design and construction has led to a global-scale of

rethinking in terms of what makes for quality housing, which as Kenny Cupers has mentioned in

his book The Social Project that “Mass housing developments can be seen as pervasively global

and yet nationally specific, never quite unique or completely alike.” And in Paris, the so-called

capital of the 19th century could have regained its title for the 20th century as it changed the

approach from adapting a mere architectural style to collaborating with many a relevant

discipline. A common censure to the housing architecture of Paris in the decades after the war as

the nadir of Parisian architecture, but again Cupers in defense writes, “Instead of the prevailing

assumption of triumphant rise and spectacular fall, this period was one of accumulative

experimentation and continual revision.”

These housing structures and complexes were planned, built, inhabited, criticized,

modified, revised, and, today, even abandoned. In the wake of the effacement and unending
criticism towards postwar modern housing, artists like Paris-based photograp6her Laurent

Kronental whose Souvenir d’un Futur (2011-2015) series of photographs, focusing on the

banlieues and their constituent housing structures, has sought to examine and cast a different

light onto what has been widely stigmatized as rotting areas of greater Paris. He also immersed

with the aging inhabitants of the buildings that were once the solid symbols of the ideals of such

postwar modernist utopia. He notes of his work and experience within the banlieues,“In this

magnificent ghostly world, the structures of our cities would be titanic, gobble the human, the

product of our fears and hopes for an organization of the city.” (Kronental, 2015) No matter the

stir in public opinion today that these structures and the processes they were hinged upon has

caused, they remain a reflection of an era tantamount in its insights in the built environment that

not only meant to organize, but also to express it and what could be.

6
Kronental, Laurent. “Inside Paris's Forgotten Utopia.” National Geographic, National Geographic, 20 Sept.
2018,
 Bibliography

Banham, Reyner.“The New Brutalism” July 27, 2010 Architectural Review,

www.architectural-review.com/essays/viewpoints/the-new-brutalism-by-reyner-

banham/8603840.article.

Bataille, Philippe, and Pierre Signoles. Recomposition Des Territoires Et Reconstruction Du Lien

Social ? De La Production De Lespace Dans Les Zones Prioritaires: Grands Ensembles

Et ZUP. S.n., 2002.

Bertrand Dorléac, Laurence. Art of the Defeat: France 1940-1944. Los Angeles: Getty

Research Institute, 2009.

Budds, D. (2018, March 08). Brutalism's Rise And Fall, As Told Through The Architecture Of

Paris. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/3068790/brutalisms-rise-and-fall-

as-told-through-the-architecture-of-paris

Claude, Viviane. Faire la ville. Les métiers de l'urbanisme au XXe siècle. Parenthèses, 2006.

Cupers, Kenny. "The Social Project". Places Journal, 2014. doi:10.22269/140402.

Downie Jr., Leonard, “The New Towns of Paris: Reorganizing Suburbs.” APF, May 1972,

aliciapatterson.org/stories/new-towns-paris-reorganizing-suburbs.

Dumont, Marie-Jeanne. Le Logement social à Paris 1850-1930: les habitations à bon marché.

Liège:

Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia, Arts and Politics in France between the Wars.

London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Gravier, Jean-François. Paris Et Le désert Français: décentralisation, équipement, Population.

Le Portulan, 1947.

Hausman, Tami. "Mobilization and Modernization in Vichy France, the National Renovation

of Paris, 1939-1945." Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2001.

Hussey, Andrew. "How Postwar Paris Became The Intellectual Capital Of The World".

Newstatesman, Last modified 2018.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/05/how-postwar-paris-became-

intellectual-capital-

world?fbclid=IwAR3ECwquwyY3qSI1nL3aujbnQU1DofpSnlCLOLwOh7QhD7V3_Euv

9-Zd4B4.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Architecture Cold Comfort The New French Towns.” The New York

Times, The New York Times, 19 Nov. 1978,

www.nytimes.com/1978/11/19/archives/architecture-cold-comfort-the-new-french-

towns-architecture.html.

“Ivry-Sur-Seine - Ensemble De Logements - J. Renaudie.” As-Tu Déjà Oublié ? 50s,60s,70s

Architecture, 31 Jan. 2012, astudejaoublie.blogspot.com/2012/01/ivry-sur-seine-

ensemble-de-logements.html.

“Ivry-Sur-Seine: The Architectural Genius of Renée Gailhoustet & Jean Renaudie in Paris

Banlieues.” THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE, 21 May 2018,

thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/ivry-sur-seine-architectural-genius-renee-

gailhoustet-jean-renaudie-paris-banlieues.

Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard, and Frederick Etchells. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning.

John Rocker, 1929.

Kronental, Laurent. “Inside Paris's Forgotten Utopia.” National Geographic, National

Geographic, 20 Sept. 2018,

www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2016/06/laurent-kronental-paris-

housing-projects/.

Les Années 50. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988.

Lucan, Jacques, ed. Eau et gaz à tous les étages: Paris, 100 ans de logement. Paris: Pavillon de

l'Arsenal, Picard, 1992.

Mckay, Graham. “Misfits' Guide to PARIS.” Misfits' Architecture, 9 Oct. 2018,

misfitsarchitecture.com/2017/07/09/misfits-guide-to-paris/.

Olsen, Donald J. The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1986.

Picon-Lefèbvre, Virginie. Paris-ville moderne: Maine-Montparnasse et la Défense, 1950-1975.

Paris: Norma, 2003.

Portilla, Daniel. “Films & Architecture: ‘My Uncle.’” ArchDaily, 1 Aug. 2012,

www.archdaily.com/259325/films-architecture-my-uncle.

Robin, Enora. “Paris Is Leading the World in Progressive Urbanism – Here's How.” The

Conversation, The Conversation, 22 Nov. 2018, theconversation.com/paris-is-leading-

the-world-in-progressive-urbanism-heres-how-54792.

Wakeman, Rosemary. The Heroic City. Paris, 1945-1958, Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2009.

Wilson, Robin. (Ed.). (2017). Brustalist Paris map. United Kingdom: Blue Crow Media.

Scalbert Irènèe, and Gabriele Basilico. Jean Renaudie. Architectural Association, 2004.

Zoetmulder, Anton. Jean Renaudie; to Give Voice to That Which Was Silent . Issuu, 2014.
 Figure References

Figure 1 Downie, Jr., aliciapatterson.org

Figure 2-3 Google Maps, apetitecouronne.tv

Figure 4 Downie, Jr., aliciapatterson.org

Figure 5-6 https://misfitsarchitecture.com

Figure 7. Léopold Lambert (2014-2018), https://thefunambulist.net/

Figure 8-9. Léopold Lambert (2014-2018), https://thefunambulist.net/

Figure 10-11 https://architopik.lemoniteur.fr, http://www.pascalchour.fr

Figure 12-13 https://architopik.lemoniteur.fr, Blue Crow Media