Excerpt: Vanessa Grossman on Communism and Postwar Architecture in France

In her new book published by Yale University Press, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, Assistant Professor of Architecture Vanessa Grossman offers an account of the significant relationship between communism and modern architecture in postwar France. This excerpt outlines the structure of the book and describes how the narrative, which brings political theory and architectural history into conversation, explores the shifting but enduring alliance between modern architecture and the French Communist Party (PCF) since the aftermath of France's 1958 political crisis, sparked by the Algerian War of Independence and Charles de Gaulle's rise to power.
 

Toward a Post–Cold War Fragmentation

Tracing the metaphorical relation between political discourse and architecture, this book analyzes architectural and urban artifacts by exploring the frictions between discursive and material spaces. Although political concepts and doctrines can be recast, architecture takes on concrete forms that not only retain the moment of their conception but are also subject to further developments and interpretations. The method, and indeed the purpose, pursued here is to render intelligible the discursive correspondences between disciplines, as well as the production of disputed meanings. To do so, I have used a case study method rather than a continuous narrative. Architectural artifacts are treated as material evidence for political circumstances that they not only discursively echoed but also helped to construct. For example, the new national headquarters designed by the protagonists of this book for the Central Committee of the PCF in Paris (1965–80) helped launch the official campaign to update French communism, which in turn, had prompted its commission.

The chapters that follow expand from their contexts into a transnational chronicle tracking paradigmatic shifts in architectural and urban history as they intersect with Cold War geopolitics. Taking off from Kriegel’s concept, chapter 1 accounts for the origins of the relationship between modern architecture and French communism, focusing on the party’s founding during the interwar years. It sheds light on the role of pioneers such as André Lurçat, who paved the way for a network of Communist architects after World War II, and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, one of the PCF’s prominent founding members and a main figure of the Popular Front. Following a brief portrait of the main actors and an analysis of the mechanisms leading to the formation and functioning of the Communist collaborative networks that made the post-1958 concrete alliance, the book is structured around four episodes.

In the beginning of the Fifth Republic, as explored in chapter 2, the members of the future alliance hoped for a unity of architecture and politics. Particularly important was the scale of the prospects offered by the municipal government for a single, formal social program for the Communist countersociety. Inflected by the lessons of Communist-sponsored militant theater, this hope was best manifested in the way the image of béton brut was staged by the AUA to shape the social housing and public works of different cities of the Paris banlieue in the first half of the 1960s, in what the AUA later defined as the New Brutalism. The chapter unveils how modern architecture became a shared discursive mode. Some expected it to be a kind of theatrical art, while others saw it as a literal metaphor for concreteness and resistance. As I argue, they eventually settled on the idea that the ultimate product of architecture was something along the lines of an image or surface of concreteness, which triangulated an identity between a Brechtian theatrical sign system, material expression, and space.

What follows in the chapters ahead is the collapse of this unity into increasing fragmentation. Although architectural modernism was envisaged by French Communists as a benchmark for a universal postrevolution Communist society, it ultimately forged an archipelago condition within capitalism. This happened through both the “management” and the “imaginary projection” of the working class, to use anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s terms. This trajectory unfolds throughout the book in transitional surges, for which each of the case studies is instrumental. While the chapters offer discrete historical windows, their progression moves from unity, to two sides, to connections between them, and finally to systematicity.

One of my aims in this book, then, is to establish a new groundwork for understanding the intersection of modern architecture with ideology, power, and governance on the western side of the Iron Curtain.

Chapter 3 explores how, on the eve of May 1968, the party’s apparently monolithic character (which ran the risk of seeming authoritarian or totalitarian) was aesthetically mitigated in myriad ways by the idea of architecture as a mirror. It makes this argument by examining the commissioning of Oscar Niemeyer in 1965 for the design of the new national headquarters of the PCF’s Central Committee in Paris. Conceived by Niemeyer in collaboration with founding AUA members Paul Chemetov and Jean Deroche and French designer Jean Prouvé, this iconic building stretched symbolism and image manipulation to the utmost. The reflective facade acted as a mirror, serving as a metaphor for the split mentality of the Cold War, which after the mid-1960s gradually gave way to an internal scission between the PCF’s hard-line cold warriors and the vanguard who favored a thaw and aggiornamento. The metaphor echoed the altercation over “creation” and “production” between the party’s Marxist theorists and Louis Althusser, reflected in the way the design team enacted an indecisive modern monument that fell somewhere between a Stalinist-era palace and a “House of the Worker.”

Chapter 4 shows a third term being introduced, softening the hard oppositions. This third term oscillated—sometimes it was the coalition with the new couches intermédiaires (intermediary social strata), or the search for a third way between communism and the New Left; sometimes it was the association of urbanism with landscape design, or a third way between modernism and a gradually ascending postmodernism—and how much softening should happen was up for debate, a debate that echoed the increasing shattering of political, social, and ideological landscapes in France and elsewhere. The new generation of French Communists had a strong tendency to believe that the days of Cold War polarization were over, that integration ought to take place instead, and that architecture should somehow be a bridge.

At “Pour un urbanisme . . . ,” an ambitious national conference organized with the help of the editors of La nouvelle critique in 1974, at the apex of the Union de la gauche, this bridge was forged. The conference was held at the foot of the Alps in Grenoble, almost a decade after Mitterrand’s new PS unexpectedly gained control of that city. “Pour un urbanisme . . .” rallied diverse bodies of expertise well beyond party allegiance—architects, urban planners, sociologists, economists, geographers, workers—side by side with political leaders, elected officials, and civil servants. The event formalized unforeseen dialogues among its twelve hundred participants, highlighting the fraught issues—ranging from whether class struggle can be resolved at the level of the neighborhood to whether architecture is a bulwark against revolution or can still be relevant after the revolution (to echo Le Corbusier’s famous “Architecture or Revolution”)—for which May 1968 represented an urban turn.

Chapter 5 is about the total fragmentation of architecture in which links or systems (or infrastructural thinking) between building elements and spaces began to dominate. This was best illustrated in the ambitious all-concrete master plan designed by Gailhoustet and Renaudie for the 1962–86 city center urban renewal of Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb of Paris that Emmanuel Bellanger calls the “capital of French communism.”67 The eventual replacement in Gailhoustet and Renaudie’s urban scheme of the cultural center around which it had been strategically structured epitomized the challenges facing the urban renewal project from the mid-1970s onward, when the problem of representing the working class created a scission between Communist architects and dirigeants (leaders).

Building on the imbrication of structuralism with politics and a belief in participatory democracy and self-management, Gailhoustet and Renaudie’s collaboration aimed to assert agency over people’s potentialities in the complexity of its systems, forms, and spaces. These were translated into a cluster of new building types—mixed-use housing towers and megastructures, with unusual star-shaped layouts for various apartment types interconnected by abundantly planted terraces. The project’s biologism—the idea of architecture as itself a set of relations—was as close as it gets to a nonauthoritarian collective inhabitation in architecture. It resonated with the geopolitical mentality of the end of the Cold War, in which the world, the city, and society at large were made up of multiple poles or groups—a mentality that presented communism with an ultimatum.

One of my aims in this book, then, is to establish a new groundwork for understanding the intersection of modern architecture with ideology, power, and governance on the western side of the Iron Curtain. I do so by delving deeply into an alliance of operative architectural and political forces in postwar France that took shape in the most utopian and totalizing international movement of the twentieth century, in the process providing a multidisciplinary history that bridges the two. What emerges from this chronicle are “other histories” of the Trente glorieuses from the point of view of the architectural and urban discourse of Gaullism and its aftermath. That is, histories that take a more nuanced approach to the usual association of the high-modernist architecture of the period with the technocratic structures of state capitalism that it replicated.