Contenu du sommaire : Villes nouvelles et grands ensembles II

Concrete assembly systems: Forms and figures in prefabrication in France, 1947-1952 After the Second World War, France went through a period of unprecedented modernisation in the construction sector. All those involved at the time agreed on the idea of industrialisation, but it was the State that provided the driving force with the launch of a policy of voluntarist experimentation. While this would lead, by the mid ‘fifties, to a predominance of the heavy prefabrication that would enable most of France's large housing projects to be built, constructional development in the preceding period was, in point of fact, speculative. A multiplicity of new procedures, chiefly associated with prefabrication, emerged one after the other. Through different case studies this article aims to show the diversity and evolution of thinking about prefabrication during this period, and to consider how the construction process became a determining factor in the way architecture was imagined.

A modern and democratic ideal in order to help a urban global work. Le Havre decided to open a flat to the public while the city was being listed UNESCO World Heritage site (2005). This cultural mediation wants to create a debate on the housing problem, based on the dwellings of the ‘‘Hotel de Ville'' place, built by Auguste Perret's workshop in 1946. The museography focuses the historical points of view on three constituents of the housing project: the building, the flat and the furniture. A focus on those fields enables to find an ‘‘enduring'' conception of modernity, where democratisation is the base of a ‘‘mass production'' of accommodations which, with a technical point of view, will put on the standards applied to the ‘‘grands ensembles''.

Images of the tower block housing estates. Ministries in charge of housing and their audiovisual production (1944-1966). After the second World War, the Ministries in charge of reconstruction implemented an audiovisual policy which can be analyzed through the films stored at the Information and Communication Department of the Ministry of Equipment. Those films, produced or acquired by the Ministry, aimed to promote the French reconstruction policies, especially the tower block housing estates, to the French public as well as to the international community. The tower blocks were introduced as a remedy to the housing crisis and a solution to the problems of an industrial city. They were also seen as the ideal framework for the development of a modern life and a modern France. The films, however, seem to reveal the first signs of fear of a Ministry unsure of its reconstruction policy. They are also not indifferent to the criticism of those years, mainly against the tower block housing estates, thus paving the way to a subtle, evolving propaganda.

Val-de-Rueil, new town patrimony The purpose of this article is, at once to explain the notion of «patrimoine des villes nouvelles», and to confront the intents of the creators of the new city ValdeReuil founded in 1967, with its realization. This concept called «Germe de ville» has been developped in 1968 and the building of the town lasted from 1975 to 1980. But before all, this article shows the building process so as the development of a new city after an experimental period. Finally it allows the identification of the patrimony, just as an important process of «renouvellement urbain» will soon take place on the whole agglomeration.

The cultural and educative centre «Les Heures Claires» of Istres: a glow of utopia in the Marseille's region The Centre Educatif et Culturel (CEC) Les Heures Claires of Istres is one of the rare urban space where one can find, in an homogeneous entity, equipments of different natures and temporalities – among which stand a high school, a theater, a sporting club, a social counter, a ‘Maison pour tous' and a familial holiday resort. Conceived in the 1970's by the Atelier de Montrouge, this «integrated equipments» project is an icon of recent history, and this for several reasons. Globally, it bespeaks of a happy, generous period, aimed on reinvention of social life's patterns. On one hand, its genesis, in the motion of May 68, reflects a State politic calling for a profound revision of the way of conception of the housing projects, as well as the teaching and equipment projects. On the other hand, its implementation is intimately linked to the more general and complex history of the Rives de l'Étang de Berre new town's project, that was then a very vague project. Finally, because of its constructing principle, the CEC of Istres sends back to a specific theoretical approach, interested by the potential of new «open industrialization» techniques to generate «town germs», flexible, evolutive, appropriable by their inhabitants.