ABSTRACT
The banlieues, areas of postwar housing in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, are routinely associated with a single architect. French and international critics have pointed to Le Corbusier’s modernist architectural principles as a cause of the persistent social unrest in these suburbs over the past decades. Nevertheless, the architect’s own involvement in France’s postwar building boom was very limited, and commissions for mass housing estates went to the country’s elite corps of Beaux Arts–trained architects. This chapter explores the institutional and technological networks through which architectural ideas circulated and modern housing was realized in postwar France. It traces the relationship between architectural authorship, heavy concrete panel prefabrication, cultural perceptions of French suburban living, and the real estate and construction industries. Its argument is that architectural influence can be understood as the inscription and transformation of formal and social ideas in fields far removed from the professional domain of architecture, but that were directly implicated in the spatial transformation of postwar France.
