Late modern industry: The politics, rhetoric, and design of industrialized housing in France, 1954-1981

This dissertation examines two episodes of French architectural production in the 1950s and the 1970s when leftist architects were enlisted by the government to reimagine the relationship between architectural form and industrialized production. Created under the mantle of reform following two tumultuous periods, the open competitions for the Ministère de la reconstruction et de l'urbanisme's (MRU) design-build programs in the mid-1950s and the Plan Construction of 1970s were designed to revolutionize the construction industry while overhauling failed policies for urbanism and mass housing. In a shift away from earlier visions of the state architect as haut fonctionnaire, in the second half of the twentieth century, leftist architects such as Georges Candilis and Paul Chemetov entered into the technocratic system of production in the nebulous role of `innovator' to serve diverse, even antithetical political goals. Rather than leading to a new functionalism, this dissertation argues that the contradictory impulses embodied in these competitions—at once propaganda, marketing, and reform—opened onto a vast and unpredictable universe of post-WWII theories and mythologies that were deeply embedded in the politics of the welfare state, the legacy of French colonial urbanism, the Cold War race for technological dominance, and the artistic and political recriminations of postmodernism. The first chapter examines the modalities and impact of the little known proposal and realizations by the firm Candilis-Josic-Woods for the 1954 MRU competition Opération Million. The second chapter offers a new history surrounding the événements of May 1968 in the architecture program at the École des Beaux-Arts, highlighting the new Unité Pédagogique 1 and their radical commitment to a "pratique opérationnelle" for modular construction. In the third chapter I provide a critical archaeology of the Plan Construction, focusing on the development of three architectural competitions—the PAN, REX, and Modèles Innovation—designed to function as a veritable laboratory for industrial housing design. The fourth chapter treats architect Paul Chemetov's work on industrialisation ouverte—an ultimately illusive form of open source prefabrication promoted by Plan Construction—which intersected with his politics as one of "derniers puritains" dedicated to the ethics and materialism of modern architecture into the 1970s.