Feb. 1, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a left political party in an affluent Western country. It dominates in urban areas but struggles elsewhere; its working-class voter base has splintered with deindustrialization and more progressive, college-educated factions have emerged. As the nation becomes more multicultural, the party gets increasingly attuned to cultural and identitarian politics, but this doesn’t seem to bring in enough new voters. Meanwhile, a housing crisis rages in its own metropolitan centers of power as its once-influential urban development program founders.
This is not the story of the US Democratic party — it’s the Communist Party of France, or PCF. In the years after World War II into the 1970s and ’80s, the PCF was a powerful force of municipal policymaking, dominating Paris’ close-in suburbs, or banlieues. There, a tight community of party-affiliated architects designed social housing and other public buildings at the behest of local mayors.
In A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, University of Pennsylvania architectural historian Vanessa Grossman explores how this group tested the limits of both formal innovation and the usefulness of urban design as an explicitly political tool. The first major architectural history of this time and place, the book takes readers into what looks like to be an alternate reality, where the suburbs of the country’s biggest city are known for radical class struggle and norm-shattering architecture instead of social homogeneity and tract homes.
The political factions and animating ideologies are very different from those found in the US, but the urban crisis that emerged in Communist-governed French cities decades ago is surreally similar to the one gripping many American ones today.
French Communists found considerable electoral success immediately after World War II and remained “the most important left-wing party in France until the late 1970s,” Grossman says. But because Marshall Plan aid was contingent on avoiding Communist governance, the PCF was never part of the coalition managing French parliamentary democracy. “Excluded from the national level of government for most of its history, the PCF has never been able to take full advantage of the state apparatus,” Grossman says. “Nor has it ever had the support of most businessmen and industrialists.”
Instead, the party exerted power through the built environment, at the local level. The municipal budgets managed by the Communist mayors that dominated the banlieues meant they could grant public commissions to architects like Renée Gailhoustet (the rare woman architect), Jean Renaudie, Paul Chemetov, Jean Prouvé and Brazilian political exile Oscar Niemeyer. Support for this urban development program came from a network of party-allied nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets and construction companies.
“Their sphere of power was really limited to the local sphere, and they made a difference,” says Grossman.
Modernism was the party line of the day, and beton brut — the austere and occasionally sculptural forms of Brutalism — became the signature of PCF architecture. But in many ways, the party’s commitment to social housing was clarified and defined by the French state’s solution to its postwar housing crunch. From the 1950s to the ’80s, the national government built housing projects called grands ensembles across the Paris suburbs — often mega-scaled high-rises that seemed suspiciously similar to Le Corbusier’s 1925 plan to raze much of the city and replace it with 18 implacable and silent cruciform towers.
One grand ensemble Grossman draws out to contrast with the legacy of PCF architecture is the Croix-Blanche development in Vigneux-sur-Seine. Made up of seven residential towers up to 23 stories tall with a smattering of low-rise housing blocks, Croix-Blanche, built in 1962, contained 2,648 units and it would come to house a third of the town’s population. Its facade matched gray precast concrete panels slotted in with asymmetrical abstraction next to narrow bands of windows, all hovering ominously above the surrounding red brick neighborhood.
Residents of such projects typically found themselves isolated and stigmatized, and the grands ensembles were soon pathologized as dens of crime and dysfunction — a pattern recognizable to anyone familiar with American public housing projects such as St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe complex.
PCF-affiliated architects were certain they could do better. Instead of purely utilitarian mass-produced expediency, Communist architects turned modernism toward vernacular forms and materials that celebrated the handicraft traditions of the French working class.
One example, also completed in 1962 in Vigneux-sur-Seine, is the Briques Rouge housing project. There, architects Paul Chemetov and Jean Deroche used wood, pebbles and bricks alongside beton brut, and even included (heretically, for some modernists) pitched roofs. There was a sense that these buildings (with one-tenth the units of Croix-Blanche) were handmade, and not the product of an omnipotent or unfeeling bureaucracy. Croix-Blanches has since been demolished and remodeled; Briques Rouges still stands.
In time, this architecture evolved in more formally expressive and experimental ways that critiqued modernist tradition. This happened at a time when Communism and modernism were both in crisis, which meant that breaking up rigid political and design ideologies happened at the same time and place. In working-class Paris suburbs like Ivry-sur-Seine, which this year is marking 100 years of Communist local governance, architects found local leaders willing to take risks on wildly inventive projects.
Conceived as a rebuke of modernism’s minimalism and urban monotony, Gailhoustet and Renaudie’s master plan for Ivry’s town center is a jagged and diffuse pile of triangular volumes that leveled the unity of the superblock into a mosaic of ramps, rooftop terraces and gardens, suffusing them with enough light and air to approximate single-family-home living.
Initially, not even the French government could deny the project’s success. “Despite being the achievement of a Communist-managed municipality, these star-shaped apartments became one of the standards for the state policy of architectural innovation,” says Grossman.
Other marquee projects of the party also defied tropes about modernist ideology and Communist living conditions. Niemeyer’s Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, for example, is curvilinear and romantic; a domed luxury forum with a ceiling clad in shimmering aluminum blades. It’s now rented out for luxury fashion photos shoots and is a popular office space for graphic design firms.
Producing Communist architecture in capitalist France often meant making compromises. When funding to finish apartment projects ran out, clients would sometimes sell units to individual buyers, a concession to the free market that was regarded as “antithetical to the French Communist project,” says Grossman.
The tide of mass consumerism eventually obligated these architects to design a mall, albeit a Brutalist one decorated with vaguely anti-consumerist pop art riffs. The Grand’Place shopping center, which opened between Grenoble and Échirolles in 1975, integrated offices and a contemporary art center with services like a post office and a library. The project also included open spaces and some very on-brand public art: One section of a mural depicts a raft made of steak inhabited by starved sailors on an ocean of French fries, a reference to Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusathat offers an extremely French sense of intellectualized ambiguity.
The architects “wanted to subvert the mall, to make it something civic,” Grossman says. “It shows how they had to deal with contributing to the French Communist project and the specifics of Western Communism.”
These wild swings didn’t always work, and when they failed, the new housing developments sometimes looked and functioned a lot like the grands ensembles they were meant to critique. One example is the Quartier de l’Arlequin in Grenoble, which was conceived in the late 1960s as a laboratory for Henri Lefebvre’s ideal of the universal “right to the city.”
A massive complex of 1,800 housing units in the French Alps, the Arlequin buildings were arranged around an intensely walkable network of footbridges and squares that connected residents to commercial, educational, social and cultural spaces. Bright pop-art colors balanced the acres of concrete, with pedestrian streets moving through the complex and into the buildings themselves. Le Nouvel Observateur described it as a self-contained nesting doll of urbanism: “We take the street, and we place it inside the house. We take the house, and we place it inside the school, the school inside the theater, the theater inside the library.”
But, as in the US, residents of large mass housing facilities soon suffered from a lack of maintenance and investment. (The Arlequin complex is now set to undergo a series of partial demolitions and rehabilitation.) “These projects could have had a different fate and succeeded, but they faced a hostile political and socio-economic environment,” Grossman says. “As with Pruitt-Igoe, I would point out that these housing projects were largely defunded throughout the 1970s and 1980s.”
The party’s building program suffered self-inflicted wounds as well, Grossman notes: When deindustrialization sapped their traditional working-class base, the PCF failed to embrace the recent immigrants that replaced them as their natural constituency. “The PCF’s message did not resonate with the immigrants who took their place in the banlieues after the factories closed,” she says. “They failed to adapt their policies to the immigrants. That is also the social crisis of what France is today.”
Ultimately, a weakened PCF that was being denounced as authoritarian — alongside modernist architecture itself — made an alliance in 1972 with François Mitterrand’s new Socialist Party, which supplanted it as the premier left party in France. While the PCF remains a player in French politics, especially at the local level, its days of organizing its political program through high-profile acts of architecture and urbanism are behind it.
But architects still strive to weld design to a social mandate with an explicitly political ideology. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the emergence of the Design Justice movement have fueled a push to re-politicize the field, and architects have launched unionization efforts and drawn attention to abusive labor practices on construction sites.
Pursuing any sort of pure public-sector-led mass housing solution remains a perilous political project, but the PCF’s experience demonstrates how far local control can take social housing programs, even when the federal government was not aboard. Grossman’s account may have lessons for frustrated public-sector architects in deep-blue cities who see their support and funding disappear at the edge of town.
“Today, many architects and designers around the world seek to work with marginalized communities, to address the issue of housing affordability, or simply to engage locally with a particular community or environment or biome,” Grossman says. “They can make a human connection that transcends the professional realm, through scales of intervention that are more tangible and give them the means to create something small and more grassroots. The phenomenon I analyze in the book may resonate with these approaches to architecture.”