Sacha Trouiller Tutor: Eleni Axioti
Grands Ensembles -
Remnants of a Future and Architectural Potential
“It’s a matter of never demolishing, substracting or replacing things, but of always adding, transforming and utilizing them.”
Anne Lacaton and Jean Philipe Vassal
Aging concrete monoliths of the French urban landscape1, the Grands Ensembles are still the source of numerous debates and remain at the heart of political, social, economic and architectural discourse. These modern housing estates built on the periphery of major French cities in the 1960s and 1970s are alien to the collective imagination of French-style living and its analogy with the Haussmannian flats of the capital. Designed to address a chronic housing crisis in a post-war context, these projects experienced a severe social and physical degradation, and the utopian enthusiasm of the beginnings rapidly gave way to a feeling of disillusion. The population of these new towns is generally low-income, the social and ethnic segregation of these neighbourhoods is reflected in high unemployment and crime rates. The social tensions resulting from this situation have contributed to a miserable public image of these suburbs, which the local authorities wish to improve. The discourse is often based on the stigmatisation of the architecture, making these high-rise buildings the symbol of the social misery of the banlieues and the failure of the French integration policy. Thus, since what is out of sight is out of mind, it is now the norm to attempt to demolish a large proportion of these to replace them with new housing. But is it not too premature to demolish these housing complexes, materialization of an era and a utopia that we do not yet fully understand. The current situation in these sites therefore leads us to question how the limits encountered by the Grands Ensembles can be overcome by their architectural potential and rehabilitation ? This essay will first examine the conditions of production of these buildings and the architectural and urbanistic concepts that define them, before analysing the causes of their social and material degradation. Finally, based on the rehabilitation of the Bois-le-Prêtre tower by the architects Druot, Lacaton & Vassal, it will discuss the architectural approach necessary to make these dwellings desirable and healthy living spaces again.
1 Expression from “Designing Social Life: The Urbanism of the Grands Ensembles” in No. 1 Grand Plans, University of Minnesota Press, 2010
After the Second World War, the resumption of the birth rate combined with the rural exodus led to rapid urban growth. The destruction, with almost one fifth of the patrimony to be rebuilt, added to the chronic deficit of housing, the obsolescence of the buildings, the insalubrity and the insufficiency of the overall construction effort, the situation of the working classes became particularly critical. Demographic growth continued with the arrival of immigrants from southern Europe and then the Maghreb, employed in the construction and industrial sectors. The number of dwellings needed for these new populations was largely underestimated, as they were initially considered to be a temporary labour force, whereas most of them would stay and be joined by their families. This led to the formation of slums on the outskirts of large cities with miserable living conditions. Governmental studies2 were carried out from the end of the 1940s onwards to try to curb this chronic housing crisis. In 1946, the Monnet Plan was launched, but it was limited to rebuilding the equivalent of what had been destroyed during the war and to requisitioning vacant housing. There was still no real urban planning and the construction of new housing was being delayed in a context of emergency. Between 1945 and 1950, only 123,000 dwellings were built, of which less than 9,000 were considered ‘social’3. This was a far cry from the 4 million new dwellings estimated4 at the end of the war as being necessary to deal with the crisis. However, some initiatives encouraged by the authorities were launched in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most of these were experimental projects such as Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille in 1946, based on his Unité d’Habitation plan, or the Cité Rotterdam by E. Beaudouin in Strasbourg in 1951. These operations already prefigured a new organisation of the building industry, based on the notion of prefabrication. It was not until the end of the 1950s that a massive production of social housing was observed5 in France following the Plan Courant6 voted in 1953. This law aimed to facilitate the construction of groups of dwellings from a land and financial point of view, with priority given to large-scale collective housing for French working and middle-class families. It was at this time that the systematic use of standardised housing, meeting universal human needs and theoretically adaptable to all types of population, was gradually imposed. The term “Grand Ensemble” was first used by a journalist in connection with the Cité La Muette in Drancy by Beaudouin and Lods. This term was then generalised in 1953 to designate new large-scale collective housing, comprising between 500 and 10,000 dwellings.
2 These studies were conducted by the Ministry of Construction and Urban Planning (MRU), created in 1944. 3 The government use the term HLM (Habitations à loyer modéré) to describe social dwellings in France. 4 Study conducted by Eugène Claudius-Petit at the end of the war 5 The Abbé Pierre’s appeal in 1954 to the government to initiate a proactive housing policy received unprecedented media exposure and had an impact on the start of the first construction projects 6 Pierre Courant succeeded Eugène Claudius-Petit as Construction and Urban Planning Minister
The development of the Grands Ensembles is really the first materialization on such a large scale of a new architectural ideology of the 20th century: modern urbanism. Although presented as a radical rupture with the past by its pioneers, in particular Le Corbusier, it is possible to establish a link between this movement and a school of thought that appeared in the 19th century. In the context of the industrial revolution, it was a question of controlling the rapid population growth in cities and adapting them to their new functions. Despite these first attempts to rationalise traffic routes and functional specialisation, in the manner of Haussmann’s work in Paris, the industrial city was strongly criticised for its chaos and many architects, politicians and historians tried to establish new urban models. A new discipline appeared, presented as a scientific reflection on urban planning: urbanism. Based on the progressivist model7, the modern movement was propelled to the forefront of the architectural scene by Le Corbusier, the organisation of the CIAM8 (Congrès Internationaux de l’Architecture Moderne) and the drafting of the Athens Charter in 1933. This architectural manifesto considers Man as universal and analyses urbanism as a response to the needs of the typical individual according to four functions: “to live, to work, to circulate, to cultivate”. For its progressive authors, the application of such a modern urbanism requires the advent of the machine, with a desire for maximum efficiency. Housing is then thought of as a tool of the modern city, a “living machine”9 that responds to simple functions, to be easily adapted to any population.
Traditional Street Plan
Circulation in a Grand Ensemble, independant frome the built volumes
Circulation is considered as an autonomous entity in the modern city, optimised and designed independently of the built volumes. Modern urban planning reduces the number of streets, as too many crossings are considered to paralyse traffic. The ‘corridor street’ typology is abandoned in favour of more open urban forms, and traffic lanes are hierarchical, with a differentiation between motorised vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians10.
7 The three models of urbanism are progressivism, culturalism and naturalism. These notions are presented by Françoise Choay in L’urbanisme, utopies et réalités (une anthologie), Seuil Editions, 2009 8 The Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM), was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture 9 Notion developed by Le Corbusier 10 To guarantee maximum efficiency, the circulation axes are hierarchised according to the ‘Théorie des 7 voies’, from the national highway to the pedestrian path 11 Image from Relation entre ville et logements dans l’histoire des grands ensembles, Independant Publication, 2012
Cronenbourg Housing Estate, Strasbourg, Claude le Coeur, 1965 Separation of the circulation, car (top) and pedestrian (bottom). Aesthetics of the mass plan.
12 Images from Relation entre ville et logements dans l’histoire des grands ensembles, Independant Publication, 2012
The modern city thus rejects any sentimentality towards the past and the ideology of the tabula rasa13 prevails. The Plan Voisin, conceived by Le Corbusier in 1925 and presented as the solution to the insalubrity and overpopulation of the capital, proposed to destroy a whole part of the historic centre of Paris to build his Ville Radieuse. Although this project was eventually abandoned, it had a significant influence on major post-war urban planning projects, particularly in the capital with the urban planner Raymond Lopez14, who was at the origin of the Front-de-Seine, the new Quartier des Halles and the concept of building a Montparnasse tower. In all these plans there is talk of razing entire blocks of the city centre to the ground to build on a completely new terrain.
Plan Voisin, Paris Right Bank, Le Corbusier, 1925
Already the first theoretical limits of such modern urbanism appear when it comes to its application in housing projects. The design of the modern city with maximum efficiency implies compromises on the comfort of its housing. In a situation where all functions are optimised to the extreme and spatially distributed, it is doubtful whether there is any room left for the freedom and development of individuals. This ideology of excessive efficiency appears then to be more of a constraint than any form of progress.
* 13 Clean Slate, Table Rase in French 14 Raymond Lopez (1904-1966) was a French architect and urban planner. After studying at the École nationale supérieure des beauxarts, he was appointed chief architect of civil buildings and national palaces. In 1958 he was appointed to work on the master plan for Paris, inspired by the Plan Voisin.
The construction of the Grands Ensembles was followed by a cult of cleanliness and hygiene in social housing, but this euphoria of comfort soon gave way to social unrest and deteriorating living conditions in these buildings. In this context of incipient desilution, from the end of the 1960s onwards, a dynamic proportion of the inhabitants sought to leave collective habitations in favor of housing in the suburban areas, based on the nuclear family house. From 1972 onwards, authorities gradually abandoned the Grands Ensembles and their production15, and encouraged the middle-class families living there to opt for individual housing16/17. In this way, they implicitly recognised the political disadvantage of large housing estates, where there was a growing radicalisation of the inhabitants who moved in, particularly strengthening the Communist Party, which was not in charge at the time. This new policy in favour of the generalisation of individual property appears to be a way of controlling the population more conveniently at the electoral level. The appreciation that individuals have of a type of architecture is strongly influenced by the social class in which they are situated. Thus, this movement of departure is accompanied by a judgment of opinion that devalues these neighbourhoods. The middle classes, who were more attracted to individual housing estates, increasingly considered the architecture of large housing estates to be ugly and depressing, while the working classes continued to define it as rather healthy and modern. By their judgment of disgust and denigration of such openly working-class housing, the middle classes seek to distinguish themselves from the poorer classes18. The population of the Grands Ensembles becomes less and less solvable through the mechanisms of social housing allocation. The inhabitants then find themselves locked into a process of marginalisation, fuelled by social and spatial segregation. The introduction of the Aide Personnalisée au Logement (Personalized Housing Assistance), which aims to make the most disadvantaged households solvent, has resulted in an increase in the cost of rents by landlords. Social housing has therefore become much less advantageous for the slightly better-off families who do not receive housing benefit. They then abandoned them in favour of individual housing. The large housing estates are thus being transformed into ghettos where only the poorest and most captive populations remain. In addition to this social degradation, the buildings are ageing rapidly, due to the design flaws already mentioned in the first criticisms, which are partly due to the emergency context of the construction and to the experimentation with the use of prefabricated elements19. A lack of systematic maintenance of these buildings has replaced the heroic infancy of the early days with premature ageing only a decade later.
15 These policy measures were initiated by Albin Chalandon and Olivier Guichard 16 The Prêts Immobiliers Conventionnés (PIC) and the Plans d’Epargnes Logements (Housing Savings Plans) were set up to encourage the construction of individual housing. 17 This departure of the big ensembles is also maintained by the industrialists who see new construction markets there. 18 This was not yet the case for the working class inhabitants who still considered these dwellings to be healthy and modern 19 At the end of the 1950s, Pierre Sudreau, then Minister of Construction, launched a national consultation of experts and inhabitants of the Grands Ensembles to study the repercussions of the urban planning of the first generation of these collective housing units. It was already reported at the time that the use of prefabricated elements in the design of these large estates leads to numerous technical deficiencies, including insufficient sound insulation.
The production of Grand Ensembles estates nevertheless continues, and although the technocratic production method remains the same, in the early 1970s there are architectural inflections which are increasingly divergent from the initial concepts, with plans gradually moving away from the bar to find organizations in small groups, with buildings laid out in a less linear manner, and on a more human scale. The idea of a single building as a perfect, logical and grandiose solution to the housing problem is abandoned. The aesthetics are more akin to postmodernism, or even Japanese metabolism in the case of the Cité du Parc in Ivrysur-Seine, built in 1972, the plan is a radical break with the grid of the early productions and follows a triangular and labyrinthine layout where each element of the structure seems to be able to evolve independently in the space. There is also a greater emphasis on vegetation and the introduction of recesses and undulations in the facades20.
Cité du Parc, Ivry-sur-Seine, Jean Renaudie, 1972
20 Other examples of alternatives to the modernism of the early Grands Ensembles are presented in the accompanying photography series. The Grands Ensembles by Ricardo Bofill are also remarkable. 21 Images from Jean-Renaudie Monography, Unknown Publisher, 1925
From the late 1970s, an increasing majority of public opinion becomes opposed to large-scale urban construction projects based on the tabula rasa approach, and wants more democracy in urban policy22. This leads to the emergence of the notion of ‘rehabilitation’, which contrasts with modern urban planning and is no longer about demolishing or simply preserving the same, but rather about modifying the existing23. The large housing estates initially built on the outskirts of the cities are quickly absorbed by peri-urbanisation and some of them can thus claim a more traditional urban status. Nevertheless, the often too brutal inclusion of these buildings and the lack of connections with the city makes this transformation complex. At the urban level, these rehabilitations24 try to move away from the typology of the building bar and reconstitute blocks to give back a certain diversity and legibility to the external spaces. The traffic routes are also being reworked to reinforce the permeability of the Grands Ensembles and their integrity to the rest of the city. At the architectural level, facade works are implemented to try to change the stigmatised modern aesthetics, which often results in the addition of coloured panels. Yet these measures are often purely aesthetic, and modern urbanism is still in the background, with the space still conceived as an entity isolated from the rest of the city. Finally, these first rehabilitations often repeate the mistakes made during the production of these Grands Ensembles, how to make these sites into neighbourhoods like any other, while by defining them as entities, their particularity is reinforced. Can we really create, or rather ‘imitate’ a normal city by means of large national operations, planned unilaterally, without falling back into the failings of the initial approach to the production of this housing?
Les Mingettes, Vénitieux, inital mass plan
Les Mingettes, Vénitieux, after Rehabilitation
* 22 The law passed in 1967 on the preservation of the built heritage is a first indicator of the change in the urban authorities’ thinking and action 23 Creation of the ‘Programmes d’Architecture Nouvelle’ (Pan) in 1972 to work on the themes of housing and the city and to try to stop the social and material degradation of the Grands Ensembles. However, due to a lack of financial subsidies, only technical problems were dealt with, to the detriment of functional and urban problems 24 First Rehabilitations initiated by the programme ‘Habitat et Vie Sociale’, launched in 1977
The approach of modern urbanism thus appears limited and its implementation in the Great Ensembles defective. In fact, if we push our reasoning slightly, we come to question the very notion of modernist utopia in the case of the Grands Ensembles. The architecture of these state-led projects was more obsessed with solving an urgent need in the context of a housing crisis than with questioning the evolution of individual qualities of housing. It is difficult to find a correspondence between the modern imaginary turned towards an optimism of progress and an architectural materialisation of this imaginary in the Grands Ensembles. Poorly born, they are not a manifestation of this modern utopia but an attempt at a hasty and influenced response, where architectural thinking has not had time to achieve a balance between mass efficiency and individual quality of life. This absence is due, at least in part, to the total combination of architecture and urban planning in the design of these projects. By seeking to think of everything in a single gesture, this absolute approach upset the scales, and shifted the intention demanded by the interior living spaces to the urban master plan. The propulsion of architectural issues to a national scale, a state scale, and mass planning in their production condemned the Grands Ensembles to a distant view of the project, a distant view of its inhabitants. This distance from the fundamental questions which define the interest of housing and the city, in other words, what response for each individual in terms of comfort, use, transport or leisure, is the cause of the absence of an interface between these collective habitats and the city. The critical situation of post-war housing seems to have made us forget that it is possible to give a little more and not just the minimum to a habitat. However, these design flaws, these theoretical limitations, these actions or non-actions of the authorities do not really support the idea that demolishing these buildings and starting from a clean slate would change the situation in these areas. The “out of sight, out of mind”25 position is not an acceptable argument when the direct consequence of a housing demolition is the relocation of its inhabitants. It is worth remembering that it is the people who do not live in these dwellings who have the worst impression of them, and who defend their demolition. By applying the tabula rasa method again, the authorities are only reinforcing the prejudices about the situation of these housing estates and repeating the mistakes made by modern urban planning in the last century. It should be the responsibility of the architect never to demolish, but to transform the existing space. This requires a more contextual and moderate approach, a posture similar to Rem Koolhaas’ ‘Suspending Judgment’26, where no situation should be ignored. The incomplete architecture of the Grands Ensembles must be brought to a completion, in other words to understand their limits, and to exploit their architectural potential, this time starting from the living space and not from the urban mass plan, placing the individual and his comfort at the centre27. The debate is not really about whether or not to keep the modernist visual codes of these projects, because architecture matters less from an aesthetic point of view than for its capacity to define and modify spaces and to establish distinctions, and for the uses it brings about.
25 Expression used by JP. Vassal in PLUS - Les grands ensembles de logements - Territoires d’exception, Barcelona GG Press, 2007 26 This posture is seen in the architectural practice of Lacaton & Vassal. In a recent interview Rem Koolhaas was adding to this needed approach of humility the notion of dialogue with the future users.“Dialogue is clearly crucial. There is too much moralism going on that sabotages that.” 27 In Encyclopédie de l’Architecture Nouvelle, Alberton Sartoris presents the most notable situations in modern architecture. As a synthesis, most of the design elements are related to the users confort, with living spaces, balconies, loggias, halls or winter garden.
This can be achieved by using the existing benefits of these buildings. From a structural point of view, and despite the apparent physical deterioration, the structures are innovative and solid. The ergonomics of the circulation networks and the vertical organisation of these dwellings give an efficiency that is rare in similar geographical situations. There is a great capacity for evolution and expansion of the dwellings made possible by an open plan without load-bearing walls. It is possible to envisage greater flexibility of layout and potential changes of programmes within the buildings. Through their high-rise typology, the Grands Ensembles have the potential to offer dwellings a unique view of the city, while playing with the transparency of their facades. Finally, the free outdoor space between buildings on the same site can be used to densify and create the necessary proximities and connections between housing, services, equipment, shops and the environment. The problem with the political paradigm of the 1970s of promoting individual houses for solvable families is the systematic opposition today between individual and collective housing. However, “for the same social situation, a detached house is just a less well-designed flat set in the middle of a garden”28. By affirming the architectural potential of the Grands Ensembles, this essay does not condemn the individual house. These two types of housing are actually very similar, they are the two ultimate manifestations of the same notion of congestion, the flat being the perfect vertical representation and the house the horizontal implementation. While a de-densification of urbanism in the manner of the naturist model, with individual housing, is desirable, it is problematic in terms of ecology and land occupation, and is not feasible in an urban environment where thousands of people are in demand for housing. Nevertheless, it is possible to use certain aspects of the nuclear family house, notably the freedom it embodies, and to adapt them to the collective housing of the Grands Ensembles. The rehabilitation of the Bois-le-Prêtre tower in Paris by the French architects Druot29, Lacaton and Vassal30 demonstrates that it is possible to offer the flexibility and comfort of individual housing in these collective dwellings by taking advantage of the existing with an efficient design. By introducing the notion of luxury into the Grands Ensembles, they assume that it is feasible to make their sufficiency a desirable form of living.
28 From by A.Lacaton in ‘Individu Individuel’ PLUS - Les grands ensembles de logements - Territoires d’exception, Barcelona GG Press, 2007, about the sterile debate between collective housing and individual houses 29 Frédéric Druot (1958) graduated as an architect from the Ecole d’Architecture de Bordeaux in 1984. In 1987 he found the studio Epinard Bleu 30 Anne Lacaton (1955) and Jean Philippe Vassal (1954) both graduated as architects in 1980 from the Ecole d’Architecture de Bordeaux.
Completion, 1961
First Rehabilitation, 1995
Druot, Lacaton and Vassal Second Rehabilitation, 2014
This 16-storey, 96-apartment building built in 1961 by the urban architect Raymond Lopez is interesting because it has experienced all the stages of degradation and rehabilitation discussed in this essay. A first attempt to renovate the facade in 1995 with the clumsy addition of coloured panels with a childish layout did not manage to stop the deterioration of the living conditions in this block. Druot, Lacaton & Vassal then transformed the building by keeping its floors and a large part of its interior layout so the inhabitants could stay during the rehabilitation process. New floors, built as a self-supporting structure, were added to the periphery of the existing building on each floor to extend the living rooms and create terraces and winter gardens. The existing facades with small windows were removed and replaced with large transparent openings to take advantage of the views made possible by the height and location of the project. In addition to this work on transparency and the tracing of the facades, the interior treatment of the landings, the densification of the lower floors for the installation of specific services and equipment, the introduction of welcoming and safe lobbies and the allocation of the exterior spaces were also carried out.
Facade Extension Axonometric by Druot, Lacaton & Vassal, introduction of an semi-enclosed wintergarden and a balcony.
8 Images from Lacaton & Vassal architects, lacatonvassal.com
This project therefore proposes to do more with the existing, and defends its approach by the fact that a transformation costs much less if it is well designed than a demolition and reconstruction Druot, Lacaton & Vassal have conserved the advantages of the high-rise building and the vertical distribution and have introduced a horizontal extension with balconies and loggias, thus offering each flat its own ‘garden’. This new space offers a tangible comfort, with more usable surface, better lighting conditions and a new view of the city, and an intangible luxury of new services and uses without impacting on the rent of the flats. These semi-open rooms without predefined functions imply a new, more permeable and nomadic way of life, based this time on the climate of the site. They play a role as a membrane between public and individual space, and thus bring collective housing a little closer to the individual house. Also the dedensification of certain floors to introduce additional uses and equipment to the building can provide an answer to the geographical and social isolation of the place. With this architecture of consideration for the inhabitants, and without impacting on rents or liberalising the real estate market of the place, the architects attempt to make the collective dwellings of this block more desirable and thus to attract new, wealthier populations, in order to allow a healthy and balanced social diversity. Although the notion of comfort and luxury is constantly evolving, it is more by the approach of the work than by the actual facilities that this project can be a real success, and avoid any new physical or social degradation in the future.
* Thus, despite what the prevailing discourse would have us conclude, there is a real optimism that emerges from the Grands Ensembles, because of the architectural potential they represent. They are an opportunity for architects to explore and overcome the apparent limits and paradoxes of their design, and to propose new solutions that are not limited to the classic distinctions between interior and exterior, collective and individual housing, public and private, housing and services. The rehabilitation of these dwellings is not an end in itself, but the trigger for a long process of social and material improvement. By adopting a more contextual approach, and by rehabilitating buildings on a case-by-case basis, by listening to the users of these dwellings who are the first impacted and not the voters, it is quite feasible to envisage Grands Ensembles where human comfort and freedom are the starting points of the architectural reflection.
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Souvenirs d’un Futur A short photography series on four Grands Ensembles accompanies this essay. As a native of Paris, I have been around and photographed some of these structures for a long time and writing this essay was also an invitation for me to understand them better. I did not really choose these images to support the argument of the text, it is simply a tribute to such a particular and fascinating aesthetic.
Les Choux, Créteil, Gérald Grandval, 1974
Les Damniers, La Défense, Jacques Binoux, 1976
Unknown Housing Estate, La Défense
Les Orgues de Flandres, Paris, Martin van Trek, 1974
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