ABSTRACT
In 1945, the traditional building industry was in crisis, short of labour and capital, but the public-works sector, having benefitted from the war, possessed both skills and resources that might be mobilised to industrialise house building. Anticipating major investment in housing in the second National Plan, MRU embarked on a programme of industrialised building based on wartime experience with prefabricated concrete. This was opposed by those favouring a lightweight approach inspired by the motor industry. However, experiments at Noisy-le-Sec favoured the former and by 1953 the Cité Rotterdam had demonstrated that ‘heavy’ prefabrication offered real savings in time and cost. In search of yet further economies, the Ministry embarked on two much larger programmes: the construction of 4,000 dwellings for the Paris region using ‘closed’, large panel construction; and a series of developments across France sharing the same industrialised components, the Secteur industrialisé. Though not widely adopted, these experiments encouraged major builders of social housing to develop their own systems and, with mass-production of components like kitchen fittings increasingly widespread, the cost and productivity of housing construction had been transformed by the late 1950s.
