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Anna-Louise Milne, The Point of Complexity in Social Housing: From Jean Renaudie’s ‘différence’ to the Representational ‘Crisis’ of Le Grand Pari(s), French Studies, Volume 78, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 607–622, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knae151
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Extract
The history of urban planning in twentieth-century France is generally perceived to fall into two mutually exclusive phases, which are at once notoriously proximate and radically obverse. First, the ‘heroic’ period typified in the grands ensembles inspired by the functionalist modernism of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM), which provided the blueprint for massive suburban developments in the first twenty years after the war. Then, the rapidly corrective though ‘aesthetically impure’ crusade that emerged with the Banlieues 89 campaign led by Roland Castro, and found another platform two decades later when President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a consultative exercise in 2007 to develop a new and integrated vision of the Paris region. In a play on words that linked the name of the capital and the image of a gamble, it was entitled ‘Le Grand Pari(s)’.1 Jean Renaudie’s work arguably straddles this gulf, emerging from the heartland of communist-led urban planning and yet apparently anticipating many of the key terms of twenty-first-century urbanism. Though the notion of an ‘ensemble’ remains uppermost for Renaudie and the use of concrete in particular pulls towards brutalist principles and methods, as does the context of PCF-dominated municipal oversight and Renaudie’s own allegiance to the PCF (Parti communiste français), his work risks being subsumed as a salutary anticipation of the more widespread break with functionalist design.2
