Review: Journal de bord de quatre chantiers: Grands ensembles en situation, by Sandra Parvu

Abstract

Sandra Parvu Journal de bord de quatre chantiers: Grands ensembles en situation Geneva: MētisPresses, 2011, 201 pp., 95 b/w illus. €27, ISBN 9782940406647 The large modernist housing project has been, since Jane Jacobs’s writings on the city, one of the most maligned architectural legacies of the twentieth century. In her new book, however, Sandra Parvu shows that at least in France, the grand ensemble was neither uniform nor schismatically independent of local culture, and its planning did not amount to a blindly rationalist orthodoxy. Instead, variations, debates, revisions, and open criticism accompanied the design and construction of housing on a large scale from the beginning; the process also involved a wide range of professional and political actors—from architects to mayors to state bureaucrats—who pursued different and at times opposing agendas and visions. And if the visual effect could be at times monotonous, the story of the rise and fall of the grand ensemble as a planning model was not. This, at least, is the sense one gets from reading Parvu’s Journal de bord , an account of four high-modernist housing projects in postwar France: Briey-en-Foret, Bagnols-sur-Ceze, Les Ulis, and La Courneuve. The construction of grands ensembles in France barely spans two decades, from 1954 to 1973. But those were years of great economic confidence and expansion, part of the Trente glorieuses , and the volume of construction was by all measures impressive, with an official number of housing units somewhere around six million.1 Two government decisions bracketed the construction campaigns, the first one mandating the rapid and low-cost construction of housing, and the second one, in 1973, prohibiting housing projects of more than five hundred units. The fact that the grand ensemble began and ended by decree shows that its presence on the French landscape was a deeply political act with causes and implications that went well beyond the architectural realm. The marginality of architecture and the architect in shaping housing solutions …