The contradictions inherent in Viollet-le-Duc’s doctrines were made manifest in the temporary constructions built for the Expositions Universelles of 1878, 1889 and 1900, held in Paris; in these the decorative envelopes of the buildings were ever more in open contradiction with their metal skeletons. This state of conflict was also echoed in the domestic architecture which followed the great building boom under Haussmann. Although French architects rarely attained the acuity of a Horta in Belgium or an Otto Wagner in Austria, in the buildings of Guimard such as the Castel Béranger in Paris (1897–8) or in the works of the Ecole de Nancy (Sauvage) a typological renewal was combined with a new aesthetic freed from strict adherence to historic styles.

Despite the contributions of theorists such as Auguste Choisy, whose analyses introduced a rational ordering of all architectural history (1899), and Julien Guadet, whose four-volume Eléments et théorie de l’architecture (1902–4) is the most complete expression of the compositional doctrines of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, it was in fact reinforced concrete which was, at this very moment, to provide the basis for new ideas in architecture. The technical innovations of contractors such as François Hennebique, who had developed earlier contributions by men such as Joseph Monier, were soon carried further in the work of architects like Anatole de Baudot. His church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre in Paris (1894–1902) and his projects for public buildings extended the spatial and technical possibilities of this new material well beyond the suggestions of Viollet-le-Duc. At the same time these researches received a new impetus in the hands of engineers, including Freyssinet, whose works became emblematic of concrete’s role in modern architecture, and architects such as Perret, whose apartment house in the Rue Franklin (1903) and garage in the Rue de Ponthieu (1906), Paris, both had concrete frames. It was, however, on an entirely different plane that young architects were to break with the educational establishment.

Unlike in Germany, where the border area between architecture and the decorative arts provided an experimental testing ground for new ideas, the graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts turned to urbanism where they sought to apply the techniques of monumental composition taught by Guadet. The generation which succeeded Tony Garnier in Rome had the same intense curiosity for urban organization. This was true in the case of Léon Jaussely, who won the 1904 competition for the extension of Barcelona, and of Henry Prost who won second prize in the 1910 competition for the replanning of the former ring of fortifications in Antwerp. Their efforts to define the governing principles of the replanning and expansion of large cities complemented those of Alfred Agache and especially the metropolitan visions of Eugène Hénard’s Etudes sur les transformations de Paris (1903–9), in which he sought to reconcile the new traffic requirements with the urban legacy of Haussmann’s major schemes. It was at such institutions as the Musée Social, which gave birth in 1913 to the Société Française des Architectes Urbanistes, that these architects first met the partisans of housing for the working classes, who were to join in their efforts to create a convincing approach to urban planning.

In Paris, Henri Sauvage’s ‘habitations à bon marché hygiéniques’ in the Rue de Trétaigne (1903) and the housing which A. Augustin-Rey built in the Rue de Prague as a result of the important competition organized in 1905 by the Rothschild Foundation reflect the often difficult relations between the new social policies and a modern architecture still somewhat unsure of itself. At the same time the Association Française des Cités-Jardins, created in 1903 by Georges Benoît-Lévy, achieved little else besides a few modest suburban schemes. In addition to novel public buildings such as the Central Telephone Office in the Rue Bergère by François Le Cœur (1912) and the swimming pool on the Butte-aux-Cailles by Louis Bonnier (1912–24), the features of the new urban architecture of Paris were clarified before 1914 with Sauvage’s apartment building in the Rue Vavin (1912) and with the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1911–13), where Perret snatched Henry van de Velde’s commission on the basis of his dual role as architect and contractor.

The effects of World War I were so rapidly felt that Le Corbusier, who had only recently arrived in Paris, seized the opportunity offered by a still hypothetical reconstruction to propose, beginning in 1914–15, his ‘Dom-ino’ housing prototypes. The ‘Reconstructed City’ exhibition in 1916 marked the launching of a regionalist architecture which predominated during the entire inter-war period, appearing notably in the garden cities such as those at Tergnier, Longueau, Lille and Rheims, and on the outskirts of Paris, as at Drancy or Stains. With these garden cities the hygienic ideals of the pre-war years, which had won the political support of the Conseil Général de la Seine in the person of the socialist mayor of Suresnes, Henri Sellier, were continually discussed and kept alive until, having received state funding for the construction of housing under the Loi Loucheur of 1928, these ideas encountered the themes of modernism.

The principles of the new architecture were formed by the integration of the structural researches launched by Perret and the explorations of form which set out to establish the new aesthetic ‘après le cubisme’, to borrow the title of the manifesto published by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant in 1918. This architecture was disseminated through the pages of the periodical L’Esprit nouveau (‘The New Spirit’), founded in 1920, as well as in juxtaposition with foreign work in the plates of Jean Badovici’s journal L’Architecture vivante, first published in 1923. At the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris—where the presence of the Soviet Union’s spectacular pavilion should not make one forget the absence of a Germany still subject to post-war mistrust—the only manifestos of a new architectural approach were Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau and Mallet-Stevens’ Pavillon du Tourisme. Their radiance was reflected elsewhere mainly in the private houses by these same two architects and by André Lurçat and Gabriel Guévrékian, to which should be added the Maison de Verre in Paris by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet (1928–32) and the Villa at Roquebrune (1927–9) by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici.

Complexes of public housing designed by modernist architects were in fact the exception. At the Cité du Champ des Oiseaux at Bagneux (1932) and the Cité de la Muette at Drancy (1934) Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods made extensive use of prefabrication. Morice Leroux’s proposal for a ‘skyscraper’ zone at Villeurbanne, at the gates of Lyons, where Tony Garnier realized the Quartier des Etats-Unis (1924–35), is more monumental even if bearing the stamp of a modernist idiom. It was especially the rise of tourism in the south of France which spurred the wide diffusion of modernist architecture, from Lurçat’s Hotel Nord-Sud at Calvi (1930) to Chareau’s Golf Club at Beauvallon (1927), or especially to Georges-Henri Pingusson’s Hôtel Latitude 43 at Saint-Tropez (1933). The most important, unfettered opportunities were to be found, however, in municipal patronage, the only sector where building activity was unaffected by the economic crisis. This margin of freedom was exploited by Lurçat in his Karl-Marx School at Villejuif (1931–3) and especially by Beaudouin and Lods in the Open Air School at Suresnes (1932–5) and the Maison du Peuple at Clichy (1937–9), in which Jean Prouvé collaborated. However, as the architectural debate which was occasioned by the Exposition Universelle of 1937 demonstrated, the climate in France was more susceptible to compromise than to conflict in forms or doctrines. The appearance in the 1930s of a ‘third way’ between classicism and modernism, marked by the launching of the journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, is particularly evident in the architecture of Michel Roux-Spitz.

The preparations for post-war reconstruction begun by the Vichy government (1940–4) resulted in a triumph, as clear as it was short-lived, for a more sober form of modernism and especially for regionalism. After the war, however, the decisive factor was the direct intervention of the authoritarian state in urbanism and architectural patronage. The reconstructions of Le Havre by Perret, of Maubeuge by Lurçat, of Sotteville-les-Rouen by Lods, by Pingusson in the Saarland, and Le Corbusier’s wanderings from La Rochelle-Pallice to Saint-Dié and from Marseilles to Strasbourg—all these are examples of that centralized state patronage which fostered the widest dispersal of prototypes of functionalist buildings and urban forms. As a result of these immense undertakings, which were continued from the mid-1950s in the ‘Grands Ensembles’ and the ‘Zones à Urbaniser en Priorité’, industrialized construction reached a level in France unparalleled elsewhere. Yet the success of Modern Movement architects did not in practice open the doors of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to new ideas. This deficiency in architectural education, which was made worse by the paralysis of the architectural press, accounts for the feeble success of the following generations to develop a doctrinal debate. It was rather in the open fields of opportunity in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria that Zehrfuss, Michel Ecochard, Pierre-André Emery, Roland Simounet, Louis Miquel and Georges Candilis set about renewing modernist orthodoxy. Candilis was a leading light in France of Team X—born of the crisis within CIAM—whose ideas were developed by him, together with Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods, in the new town project for Toulouse le Mirail (1962, 1964–77). In such individual approaches as those of Jean Dubuisson, André Wogenscky, Edouard Albert, Raymond Lopez or Emile Aillaud, formal researches and curiosity in technology exist side by side without ever being integrated. Le Corbusier continued his series of Unités d’habitation and forged an influential change in style with Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1950–4) and Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette at Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle (1957–60), while Jean Prouvé pursued his researches into a light-metal architecture, and Paul Bossard explored industrialization in an entirely personal manner at Créteil (1959–60, 1961–2).

In the 1960s, the urban utopias of Paul Maymont and Yona Friedman bore witness to an escapist desire entirely foreign to the more prosaic adventures of the generation involved in the ‘multi-disciplinary teams’ such as the Atelier de Montrouge (Pierre Riboulet, G. Thurnauer, Jean-Louis Véret and Jean Renaudie) or the Atelier d’Urbanisme et Architecture (A.U.A.; Paul Chemetov, Maria Deroche, Georges Loiseau, Jean Perrotet, Jean Tribel, Valentin Fabre, Jacques Allégret). These teams produced the finest buildings of French New Brutalism for municipal clients in the suburbs of Paris. The launching of the Villes nouvelles in the Paris region in 1965 marked the re-animation of that state building policy which had been inaugurated earlier in a series of Prefectures, with notably mediocre results. It is nonetheless here that one must seek the anchoring point of the new themes which emerged from the crisis of 1968.

The real turning point in the debate and in architectural culture in general was indeed marked by a crisis in education and in the architectural profession; the principal consequence of this was the reconstitution of the intellectual fundamentals of training and practice and a greater receptiveness in France to the international architectural debate. The works of the A.U.A.—from the urban plan for the satellite town of Grenoble (1968) to the housing built in the Paris region—and Jean Renaudie’s work at Ivry (1970–8) coincided with new efforts on the part of the state and numerous architects to create cities formed of the simple multiplication of industrialized cells. These ‘innovative’ schemes were soon widely applied in the Villes nouvelles. Towards the mid-1970s, this spurred a reaction, much influenced by Italian ideas, amongst such architects as Bernard Huet or Antoine Grumbach, who advocated an architecture based on urban values. At the same time the debate over industrialization was relaunched with the propositions of Alain Sarfati and Bernard Hamburger, while the cunning and patience of Paul Chemetov succeeded in by-passing some of the closed systems which dominated the housing market.

Despite the success of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in the competition for the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971–7), the role of foreign architects in France remained marginal, as it had done throughout the century, if one excepts several isolated works such as those of Adolf Loos (Tzara House, Paris, 1926), Theo van Doesburg (Van Doesburg House, Meudon-Val-Fleury, 1929–30), Alvar Aalto (Maison Carré, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, 1956–9), Marcel Breuer and Pier Luigi Nervi (UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, 1953–8), or Josep Lluis Sert (Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1959–64).

While architectural politics provided foreigners with few openings—the succès de scandale of Ricardo Bofill remains a spectacular exception—it has, under the cultural pressure of the 1970s, given rise to a new generation—notably Henri Ciriani, Henri Gaudin, Yves Lion and Christian de Portzamparc—who, despite stylistic divergences, share the same concern for maintaining cultural values and an interest in the existing urban fabric into which an individual building is to be inserted.

Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago, Encyclopedia of 20th century architecture, Thames and Hudson, 1986

ART NOUVEAU; PARIS;

FUTHER READING

Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (ed.), Guide d’Architecture en France, 1945–1983, Paris 1983

Architectures en France. Modernité, post-modernité (exhibition catalogue), Paris 1981

Dormoy, Marie, L’Architecture française, Paris 1938

Besset, Maurice, New French Architecture, F. A. Praeger, 1967

Evenson, Norma, Paris. A Century of Change, 1878–1978, Berkeley, Cal. 1979

Giedion, Sigfried, Bauen in Frankreich. Eisen und Eisenbeton, Leipzig 1929

Ginsburger, Roger, Frankreich, Vienna 1930

‘La Contribution française à l’évolution de l’architecture’, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (Paris), nos. 46/47, 1953

Lemoine, Bertrand, Birkhäuser architectural guide: France 20th century, Birkhäuser, 2000

Piccinato, Giorgio, L’architettura contemporanea in Francia, Bologna 1965

Roncaylo, Marcel (ed.), La Ville d’Aujourd’hui. Croissance urbaine et crise de la cité, Paris 1983