French Mass-produced Housing in the Crucible of World War I
France is famous for its mass housing projects built in the decades after World War II. Originally viewed as a solution to the scarcity of affordable housing, these buildings have since attracted harsh criticism. They have also received more nuanced scholarly attention. Meanwhile, historians have shown how precedents from the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Cité de la Muette at Drancy, prefigured similar postwar developments. Yet the French first widely debated the idea of mass-produced, or serial, housing — meaning residential designs that can be quickly and cheaply built in large numbers — even before that, during World War I.
Until that war, mass-produced housing was a marginal idea. This changed in autumn 1914, when battles along the Western Front inaugurated a prolonged pattern of rampant destruction. France was forced to confront the challenge of how to rebuild hundreds of thousands of dwellings spread across a vast area. In this turbulent wartime context of acute labor and material shortages, as I discuss in my recent dissertation, the concept of serial housing emerged as a possible silver bullet. Numerous architects, of a range of persuasions, supported the idea. Even those who were unenthusiastic about it felt compelled to address the topic. Overnight, mass-produced housing took center stage.
Figure 1. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who later took on the name Le Corbusier, designed the Maison Dom-ino housing system in 1914 and 1915. He intended it as a solution for the rapid reconstruction of French and Belgian towns destroyed in the ongoing war. Reproduced with permission. Copyright F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.
Excitement about the idea of mass-produced housing during these years was not limited to France. People all over the world paid close attention to the ravages on the Western Front and their possible remedies. Some non-French architects became deeply involved in attempts to deploy serial housing in France as part of reconstruction. To address varied effects of World War I in their own homelands, architects throughout Europe and North America also contemplated mass-produced housing more seriously than ever before.
The rebuilding of war-torn provinces in France ultimately resulted in surprisingly few completed mass-produced housing projects. Economic, legal, and political issues impeded their realization. Nevertheless, this fervor left a sizeable legacy. Large swaths of the architectural discipline, and not just in France, continued to dream and argue about such housing. (They still do.) More important, the moment left a fundamental imprint on ideas about housing that persisted for decades.
Figure 2. Auguste and Gustave Perret came up with the Maison en série, a basic house that could be mass-produced, around 1917. Reproduced with permission. Fonds Perret, CNAM/SIAF/CAPA/Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle/Auguste Perret/UFSE/SAIF/2022.
One legacy concerns race. Today, mass-produced housing in France is chiefly occupied by the children and grandchildren of non-white immigrants, alienated socially and geographically from mainstream society, stigmatized bodies living in stigmatized spaces. Ironically, architects and commentators latched on to the idea of serial housing in World War I partly because they thought it could nurture and grow the so-called “French race,” by which they meant white people of French ethnicity.
Attempts to allocate living space by race were neither a new phenomenon nor unique to France. Cities have long been sites of racial segregation, as Carl H. Nightingale describes. By the time that World War I broke out, French colonies around the world had an extensive track record of trying to separate dwellings for colonists from dwellings for colonized groups. France was no different from other nations in that virtually no one sought racial integration. What differentiates this French discourse about race and space, though, is the verve with which the French espoused the idea of mass-produced housing as a way to strengthen their race against others.
Figure 3. Although no iterations of the Perrets’s Maison en série were ever built, Le Corbusier published some of its drawings in a 1921 L’Esprit nouveau article. Reproduced with permission. Fonds Perret, CNAM/SIAF/CAPA/Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle/Auguste Perret/UFSE/SAIF/2022.
Coming out of the Great War, France mourned its millions of dead soldiers while worrying about the repercussions of this tragedy. Equally staggering numbers of soldiers had survived the war but were shellshocked and suffering other permanent disabilities. Civilian casualties compounded these losses. Wretched living conditions on the home front had, meanwhile, led to sicker, more frail children. The French agonized over the possibility that their “race” might dwindle and waste away, especially with more war looming on the horizon. In their eyes, mass-produced housing might circumvent this catastrophic outcome by offering a secure, healthy environment for as many French couples as possible to raise kids — and thus future soldiers.
Advocates of mass-produced housing underscored the deep connection that they saw between serial housing and race. Embracing mass-produced housing aligned with eugenic ambitions for a racially and ethnically homogeneous France. No one proposed high-quality mass-produced housing for people of other races, like the thousands of Asian and North African colonial subjects brought to the imperial homeland to serve under brutal conditions as soldiers and war-industry laborers. Those immigrants were forced to live in shabby huts. Mass-produced houses, by contrast, were specifically designed to foster the French race. Their architecture and aesthetics accordingly communicated the perceived underlying characteristics of this race.
Figure 4. While trying to obtain work from reconstruction cooperatives in the former war zone, Henri Sauvage drew up plans for a so-called “cottage type” house (1922). It was meant to be built quickly and inexpensively. Reproduced with permission. Fonds Sauvage, SIAF/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d’architecture contemporaine.
A second legacy of ideas about serial housing from World War I involves technology. Discussions during the war included whether plans should stick to typological precedents, offer an entirely new way of living, or propose an incremental update; whether such housing should be built by public entities, private entities, or a mixture; and which kinds of building technologies would work best. Gradually, a consensus evolved. It revolved around two core ideas. One was to employ highly innovative (i.e. largely unproven) technologies. The other was to let private companies pave the way. These proceeded hand in hand.
“It was often the same technologies that made the war so horrific that failed to allow a new housing system to gel.”
Companies and investors poured money into developing new building materials and construction methods that could be patented in hope of windfall profits once their inventions took off. Although some argued for public housing, most bought into the prophecy that a breakthrough in materials and construction techniques, which would dramatically lower the cost of housing, was imminent. Why use public funds and policy tools to address the housing crisis, they wondered, when the market could remedy this crisis on its own?
Advocates of state-built housing made some headway. Laws passed before the war made it possible for county and municipal governments to construct low-rent residential developments using public funds. In the 1920s, a few localities began to take advantage of these laws. The Cité de la Muette, for example, was one of fifteen public housing projects that the socialist politician Henri Sellier erected around Paris during the 1920s and 30s using this legal system. Yet government-built residences remained relatively rare. No large public housing developments broke ground in dozens of towns and cities rebuilt after the war.
Figure 5. Sauvage invented this system for “small, serially-built houses” in 1922. There is no indication that any of these houses, like the “cottage type” design, were ever built. Reproduced with permission. Fonds Sauvage, SIAF/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d’architecture contemporaine.
Despite all the optimism, technical invention and the market did not generate much housing either. Unsurprisingly, no invention managed to substantially lower the cost of constructing a new dwelling. France’s great experiment in mass-produced housing instead exacerbated its housing crisis, with production never keeping apace with growing demand. Not until the 1950s and 1960s would the situation reverse.
Another irony was that it was often the same technologies that made the war so horrific that failed to allow a new housing system to gel. 1910s and 1920s, designs for serial housing hinged on things like gunite sprayed from cement guns, thin-shell concrete vaults, prefabricated and modular framing systems, lightweight metal structures, and alternative materials like compressed-straw panels, all of which had been invented or greatly improved for military purposes. But these materials designed to support unbridled militarization did not succeed in sheltering the families of soldiers who had fallen victim to it.
Figure 6. Jeanneret/Le Corbusier created perspectival drawings and paintings, such as this one, to illustrate a possible neighborhood of Maison Dom-ino houses. Reproduced with permission. Copyright F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.
While these particular materials quickly became obsolete and most designers gave up on using these materials for mass housing, the impulse to use high-tech housing endured. Between the 1950s and 1970s, France famously doubled down on the idea that it could solve its housing problems with novel technologies — this time with deep government subsidies. This premise persists today as architects try to remedy the sorry state of some of these post-World War II efforts.
Since the idea of mass-produced housing first gained traction in France, it has served as a vector for assumptions about society, politics, and economics. The worthy goal of providing more people with better dwellings turned into a front for propagating flawed ideas about race, technology, and the capacity of the private sector, while lulling designers into accepting them. Given the situation with affordable housing in France today, and of architects’ complicity with retrenchment of the state, it seems that while the housing legacy of World War I has faded from memory, its bequests have yet to run their course.
