Vanessa Grossman: Architecture and the communists.

Introducing Vanessa Grossman

0:00Hello. In this episode of the Ayers for Architecture podcast, I spoke to architect and historian Vanessa Grossman, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, about her 2024 book, A Concrete Alliance, Communism and Modern Architecture in Post-War France, published by Yale University Press. Sampling only the most tantalising soupçon of the book's ideas, Vanessa and I discussed the relationship between the French Communist Party and mid-century modernist architects, and how for them concrete served not just as a symbol of avant-garde taste,

0:30but also political commitment. Architects like Oskar Nehmeyer, René Garousset, Paul Shematov and Patrick Bouchard, and the networks of actors and actants, programmes and artefacts that were activated to deliver social housing and cultural and working spaces in communist municipalities across France, as a means of delivering, ultimately, a counter-society of architects that sought to put a new vision of modernism, a counter-modernism, to work for a better version of France's nascent Fifth Republic. But what was really achieved in the long run, beyond some small works in big places?

1:01Well, Vanessa argues, their example still chimes, not least in the continued discourse about the importance of housing as a social, cultural and political project, and of course, the challenges faced by architects in maintaining political engagement while navigating urban renewal. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture podcast by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to these, to the book, and to the fabulous Vanessa are in the podcast description.

1:32A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Training as an Architectural Historian

1:40Hello and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to Dr. Vanessa Grossman. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me all the way from the United States. We're going to be talking about your relatively recent book, A Concrete Alliance, Communism and Modern Architecture in Post-War France, which you published with Yale University Press in 2024. It's a fascinating study. It's one of these occasional podcasts that I do where it's a detailed piece of history with, I think, a great deal of cross-fertilization possibilities in it.

2:17Before we get to discussing that, Vanessa, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Vanessa Grossman. I am Brazilian, trained as an architect in Brazil in the 2000s. But very early on, I realized I was very happy writing architectural history. I felt more creative than working at the time for architectural practices in Sao Paulo, where I studied. So I engaged in a long trajectory of training myself to become a historian and a theoretician of architecture.

2:51And along that way, I also became a curator of exhibitions. So I did a master's in architectural history and theory in France. And then I did a PhD at Princeton University in the United States. And my journey very early on was built on an interest between architecture and politics. I was very, very much studying architecture at the moment at the University of Sao Paulo,

3:23when there was a kind of reassessment of modernism, being a little bit rehabilitated after, you know, a kind of flirting with postmodernism, I would say, in the 80s and 90s, in a kind of a late fashion, which has to do with the fact that Brazil was a dictatorship until the mid 80s. So when I started architecture, my professors were very interested in kind of rehabilitating modernism and its heroes,

3:54Villanelle Vartigas, Palomens da Rocha. And I was very interested in, and also Sergio Ferro, who actually self-exiled in France. So there was a real discussion about the kind of the ways in which those architects had to engage with politics. There were like an abundance of books being published in Brazil at the time. So it was a very flourishing moment for that kind of reassessment. And I was also very interested in the critique of modernism, which is something that Brazil hasn't really experienced,

4:28even though there was a kind of a flirtatious moment with postmodernism. I would say that was more at the formal level, but not necessarily at the kind of real critique. So very early on, I learned about the situationists through a kind of workshop at the Goethe Institute. I was kind of commissioned to participate in. And then that was the kind of beginning of my academic life, because I realized that I wanted to undertake a kind of scholarly research on the situationists.

5:04And I had to learn French for that. I didn't know French. And it was really a moment when even in the United States, Mark Wigley had just published his book. So there was a kind of flourishing, I would say, scholarship on the situationists international. And I was very interested in the ways in which they were very early on engaging with processes of gentrification. I'm also interested in the kind of the fate of the avant-garde in the post-war years of France at a moment when, you know, there was a kind of a tabula rasa undertaken in the center of Paris.

5:41So to me, that was a very interesting story that I didn't know about and I fell in love with. And then it took me to France. And that was the kind of beginning of this long path until the making of this book. That's fantastic. It's a really lovely story and beautifully told.

Discovering Paris and the Communist Party Headquarters

5:57Did you find when you moved to the United States distinct differences between the way that modernism was being assessed between Brazil and the U.S.? I wouldn't jump from Brazil to the U.S. because I feel like there is a very important in-between chapter of my life, which is France. Yeah. So I had the chance to, as a student of architecture, undertake a semester exchange to Delft, actually, where I ended up becoming a professor, Delft University of Technology.

6:31It was a very important moment for Delft. It was the super Dutch. So, you know, Rem Koolhaas, MVRDV, Mikano. It was the Berlage Institute was very much blossoming. That was 2003 when I went to Delft. But I took that opportunity was my first. So I had that interest. I had participated in that workshop on the Situationist International. And then I went to Delft. And I had the chance, on the one hand, to purchase many books that didn't exist in Brazil on the Situationists.

7:02On the other hand, to participate in that kind of, you know, conversation about the super Dutch that I also, you know, at the time, of course, Internet was already there, but it was not, you know, so easy to access firsthand. It was really my first time in Europe. And also there was a lag, a very kind of, I couldn't really accomplish the project because I didn't really know how to use AutoCAD at the time. So I felt, you know, it was a very important experience for me.

7:34It was also the moment of the Erasmus program. So there were many students coming from everywhere in Europe. So for me, it was a very important moment where I actually was able to go to Paris for the first time. And I already had that interest in the situation. It's international, but without really being able to speak French or read French. And so I gathered all those books. And I remember distinctively my visit to Paris. And one of the buildings I wanted to see was the headquarters for the French Communist Party, which at the time I didn't really relate very much to the situation.

8:08It's international, how those two could be related. But they can, of course, because really it's the history of the left in France and the way they engage with, you know, spatial politics, the built environment. And I remember the building was it was closed because they were protesting again against the United States invasion of Iraq at the time. So and I I I was very much struck by the presence of Oscar Niemeyer in Paris. And anyway, this is kind of a digression just to say that I went back to Brazil.

8:41I undertook I formulated based on the books that I was able to to purchase in Delft. And also I I enrolled in a French language course to be able to read those books. So I learned French by reading Guy Debord. And and then I also applied for a grant that is called Scientific Initiation for the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation, which is a one year scholarship for for a student to produce a piece of academic research.

9:15So it's really a scientific initiation. This is how it's called. And I put together a book about the the ways in which the situation is international, engaged with architecture, but also trying to relate a little bit to the Brazilian context. And when I finished that project, my advisor at the time, I wanted to publish it. And she told me, no, those those studies, they seldom they don't become a book. This is impossible. But I was very persistent and I was still finishing my studies in architecture, which is in Brazil.

9:47It's a five year professional diploma. And I told her, well, I will try. And I took my manuscript and and and and and took it to many different academic publishers. And one of them was were very interested, even though it was a scientific initiation. And I got a grant from the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation to sponsor with this publishing house, the publication of my book. And I so I ended up my architectural studies with a final diploma that was actually a project, an architectural project. But I already had a book published by the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation and this publishing house on the situation is international.

10:26And so a friend of mine sent an announcement for a kind of two year scholarship from the region of the France that allow students from less favorite countries, I would say countries in the global south to go to France to pursue a master's program. And this is what I did. So I went to France to continue my studies on the situation is international for two years at the program at Paris and Pantheon Sorbonne dedicated to architectural history and theory.

10:57And this is a kind of important chapter for two years. I was in France and my intention was really to to continue my studies at a Ph.D. level in France. But in France, I met many people. I was really not interested in wasting any of my time. I embraced that opportunity of being in Europe. I work for L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui as the assistant to the editor in chief. I interviewed many, many interlocutors.

11:27I was very interested in the relation of architecture and politics in France. And my study kind of exploded way more than, you know, kind of the situation international. I was interested in the reception of those ideas. So I interviewed Deona Friedman, Paul Verilio, Bernard Toomey. You know, I really tried to make the most of that experience. And I came across a sociologist, Jean-Louis Viollot, who wrote two very beautiful books about May 68 and architecture and May 81, which is really when the Mitterrand was elected, and architecture.

12:01And I, you know, engaged on a conversation with him about, you know, politics and architecture and how to pursue my studies. And he told me, well, I would advise you to, if you want to do a PhD, to work with Jean-Louis Cohen, who is a very important historian of architecture. He had been his co-advisor. And this is when I met Jean-Louis. And he told me, well, I no longer advise dissertations in the United States. You have to go to, sorry, in France, you have to go to the United States to pursue a PhD program.

12:34And so this is what happened. I ended up coming to the United States to continue those studies that I took in France.

The Situationist International and Post-War Avant-Garde

12:42I'm interested, of course, in the book as well. And I would really like to understand better this relationship to begin with, I suppose, your thesis around this alliance between architecture and the Communist Party of France. Is there a chronology that's traceable that explains the emergence of this connection? Yes. So when I, so in France, I was, I did two master theses.

13:12The first one was about the reception of the Situationist International among French architects of different generations. Maybe you can explain who the Situationist International were. Yeah, the Situationist International were an avant-garde group of bohemian, you know, non-architects who were very much, you know, worried about the fate of surrealism, Dadaism and in the post-war years and the ways in which they became complicit with capitalism during, you know, the reconstruction of Europe.

13:47And these were a network of international protagonists, Asger Jorn, a Danish painter, Guy Debord, a French bohemian. And they were very close to Henri Lefebvre. At some point, they also, there was a rupture with Henri Lefebvre. And they were also somehow questioning Stalinism. So it was, for me, they were really the first to denounce the rise of the Grand Ensemble in France, you know, the ways in which the built environment was kind of becoming more homogeneous.

14:17So I was very interested in the ways in which they engaged with this kind of interwar or like the fate of the avant-garde in post-war Europe and the ways in which they were kind of recentering their critique, not only in the way in which, of course, mass consumerism emerged, but also in the way they saw what was happening in Europe after the war as the kind of spatialization of capitalism, processes of gentrification before this world even existed.

14:50They really re-centered their critique around questions related to the built environment. So for me, it was very interesting. I never heard of them before. And I thought when I actually came across their work, this is also at the same time as this scholarship was actually being produced in the United States, as I mentioned with Mark Wigley. But I would say even in Europe, there was a kind of rediscovery of the situation is international. Jean-Louis Violo, who I mentioned, had written a book at the time called Situation Construite.

15:23So I came across his work when I went to France, of course. But to me, they were very interesting and they were my entry point to this question of politics and architecture in France, where it's a country that has a very strong intellectual tradition, especially in the post-war with the rise of structuralism. So it was really me as a young architect discovering this kind of intellectual tradition, which in a way has a lot of reciprocity with the culture of the University of Sao Paulo, where I study, which is very Francophile.

15:56Just to give you an example, for example, a diploma in, you know, a French university was way more. When I finished my master's in France, I could, this could immediately be recognized by the University of Sao Paulo. Whereas if you do a study, I don't know, in the United States, there is way more bureaucracy. The University of Sao Paulo is very, very Francophile. So Henri Lefebvre, Althusser, Foucault, there is a huge reception. Claude Lévi-Strauss actually was one of, you know, was involved in the foundation of the University of Sao Paulo. So there is a very strong tradition.

16:26So to me, it was, you know, something that was at the same time close to home, but that I also discovered because the way I learned about post-war architecture didn't really deal with that kind of like the depth of the relation between politics and architecture in France. Also May 68, of course, being this watershed for French culture. And in a way, there was also kind of denunciation of the built environment involved. So to me, I was very much in love with that history.

16:57And I tried to, when I was in France for two years, learn all I could. And my second, my second master's dissertation, I did two of them. I did master one and two at the Paris-Lan Pantheon Sorbonne University when I was in Paris. And I was also interested in the ways in which post-modernism was very politicized and related to May 68. So when I contacted Jean-Louis Cohen and told him, I want to do a PhD with you, I was very interested in studying post-modernism in France.

17:29Because I kind of like during my time in France, departing from the Situationist International, which was, you know, active in the 50s, I kind of studied the whole post-war and was interested in kind of delving into post-modernism more deeply. And so when I started my PhD at Princeton University, Jean-Louis Cohen was teaching there for a long time. And so I could rely on him to be a co-advisor. And I had another amazing co-advisor, Lucia Allais, who was beginning to teach at Princeton.

18:02So both of them were very influential for me. My initial idea was to study post-modernism. Post-modernism, but, and the ways in which, you know, they were somehow related to the events of May 68.

18:16And they were not some, they were, they were really trying to, you know, there was a kind of involvement of post-modernism with the radical left, which I was not aware of. And I thought, you know, we always associate post-modernism in the United States to, to neoliberal, the neoliberal turn. So to me, in France, it was way more complex than that. So I really wanted to understand that complexity. And so I started, you know, writing papers at Princeton about, about post-modernism.

Commissioning the Communist Party Headquarters

18:45But then I came across, actually, you know, you were asking me about a detailed way in which I came across the topic of my dissertation. And as I mentioned to you, one of the buildings that I visited in Paris was the headquarters of the French Communist Party, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, which, you know, is one of the, you know, if you think of headquarters for, for communist parties, they are mostly ordinary buildings. And this one was actually designed by a fellow Brazilian architect in Paris. And he, and I was very interested in that building.

19:17So I, I took one of my classes. So, you know, at Princeton, you had two years of coursework. And I was able to, for each of the classes I was writing, expand from post-modernism to kind of accommodate the topic of that specific class. And I took a very interesting class at Columbia University with Antoine Compagnon, who's a French professor. You know, he's a very prominent intellectual in France. And he, he's a member of the Collège de France, but he also teaches at Columbia University.

19:49And his class was about the year of 1966. So a whole class dedicated to that year in France, because it was really an important year for French structuralism. Many, you know, Godard's films, which engage with structuralism. Roland Barthes called the year 1966 the, the, the, the, the Année Lumière. So the real, the very important year for 1966. And this is also the year where that building was commissioned. And in the list of Antoine Compagnon, he, he actually pointed to a kind of a Congress that a central committee of the French Communist Party that took place in that year, which was very important because it's a kind of a milestone for when French Communists decided to face Stalinism and break with it.

20:38And there is a connection between the building, the fact that they commissioned a new headquarters and that decision to kind of disengage with Stalinism. That was very interesting. And that I articulated in my paper to Antoine Compagnon. And, and, and I was, of course, in dialogue with Jean-Louis Cohen, and I asked him, like, well, this is a very interesting story, like the story of French Communism and architecture. You know, and, and, and is there like a book that I can rely on, especially one that relates to that period, the sixties.

21:10And he told me, well, there is no book and it's, it will be either you or me to write the book. Because, of course, for Jean-Louis Cohen, he is, he was not only the historian who was the, I would say, the better equipped to write that history, because it has been for a long time, or like throughout his career, interested in that relationship between politics and architecture. But he was precisely interested in this relationship because he was a protagonist of that story. He was the son of someone who actually was, worked his whole life for the French Communist Party.

21:45He was himself a member of the party. He was very much responsible for the introduction of architecture into the communist agenda from his early years. So I decided to myself undertake that task of writing that book, and that became the kind of topic of my, of my dissertation, and now the topic of the book, A Concrete Alliance. This notion of alliance implies, obviously, relationships and intersections between various parts of this world.

Municipal Communism and the Banlieue

22:16Obviously, central to that is the architect or architecture as a profession. Yeah. There is also, of course, architecture as a built artifact. So these are the two kind of principal ones. And obviously, then there's the politics as well, the political party that is communism. Then there's the kind of political philosophy that is communism. But you're talking about a kind of complex, and as I read it, a sort of tripartite alliance, this alliance between materials, material specificity in the, in the Marxist sense of it, concreteness, of an architecture, as I put in my notes to you,

22:50against a sort of abstract ideology, and then the kind of concrete, quote unquote, political formations through which that was enacted. Could you speak to that a little bit? What is this alliance and how does it operate? The book is really about the ways in which I would say, well, I, when I, when I decided to undertake this task of, of studying the relation of architecture and communism. Of course, the communist party was founded in 19, in the 20s, in France.

23:24And there was a kind of a golden year of the popular front, you know, when architects were very much invested in, you know, fighting fascism, there was a kind of a hope that the left would win over fascism. And there was the blossoming of, you know, the kind of, what we call in France, municipal communism, which is the fact that many of the surrounding series, cities around Paris, were hubs for industries.

23:57And this is where the workers will live, and this is what we call the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, and how, and we, you know, started to designate those areas in the 20s and 30s. And of course, you have World War II, that was a real, you know, kind of a very moment of crisis for this, those, those cities. They became strong, they became strongholds for the French Communist Party, who invented, building on the socialist experience of the, you know, the 19th century, a way to govern those real bastions of working classes.

24:32How to kind of engage with them, how to promote the welfare, the welfare of the working classes, in a way that was very unique, promoting a kind of sociability that was very unique to those, to those parts of Paris, where the life in the factory and the life, you know, in the, in, in, in housing were somehow embedded in this idea of like, the realization of communism, the realization of communism in, in, in, in a kind of a capitalist, you know, kind of scenario.

25:04So I was very, very interested in that phenomena, of course, and I could have done a book that would, that have to do with that from the start, but it would, it would have been very big. And I felt that that moment is a very, has very interesting kind of connections to the 19th century. So it was, it's very difficult as a historian to kind of slice history and decide what is the most, you know, interesting moment to tell the story of, of communism and, and, and, and modern architecture,

25:36because there were many architects at the time, André Lourça, for example, Jean Prouvé, who were, you know, engaged with those territories. And it was a moment in which, for example, cities like Ivry-sur-Seine were really investing in promoting, you know, well-designed housing. So that is a very interesting story that, of course, Jean-Luc Cohen has written about. There are like many authors in France who have engaged with, and it's a, it's, I feel like a very self-contained moment,

26:08because it has to do with the rise of fascism. And then of course, World War II, where these territories were largely bombed, because this is where industries were located in France. So that is, of course, and then there is a history of resistance, you know, like many of the members of the Communist Party were, became clandestine, or they became, they engaged with, with resistance activities. And then we have the kind of immediate post-war years where communism had this kind of big moment of, you know,

26:41taking stock of the resistance record and becoming the kind of main party in France. But at the same time, there is this history of the Soviet Union, which runs in parallel with that ideology, right? And even though they fought, you know, Germany and the Axis powers and kind of emerged after the war as, you know, very glorious, very soon that dream faded away, you know, because of the gulags, because of Stalin. And I think, and Tony Judd, in relation to the kind of ways in which French intellectuals were so sort of attracted to communism after the war,

27:23in his book called Past Imperfect, is a very interesting story. And then there is a moment in which, of course, after this big moment of crisis, there is the kind of blossoming of in France, what's called the Fifth Republic, right? And this is a moment in which there is a real urban expansion after the Reconstruction period and where architects became very, very important. But this is the moment where, you know, in a way, the kind of apogee of communism starts to fade away.

27:56And on the one hand, and on the other hand, I would say that the apogee of modernism, in a way, it also starts to be problematic because of the ways in which the Reconstruction somehow promoted the homogenization of the built environment in France, which is precisely what the situation is criticized. So this is the kind of like the story, the story. And that, and I would say the Fifth Republic in France is the beginning. It starts at the apogee of those two, communism and modernism. But then there is a kind of a gradual decline that goes until the 80s.

28:30So this is kind of like, for me, when I started to approach the topic of, you know, the relation between communism and modern architecture, where do I start telling the story? What is, what would be the most interesting, you know, ways in which I would also take stock of the research that I had undertaken so far? And to me, it was precisely to start with the crisis, because the Reconstruction also had its own implications. There is a kind of inheritance of the Vichy period in France, you know, inheritance of the institutions of the war.

29:05And I felt, you know, at some point I could go back to that phase. But I started, I decided to start from the crisis. And the crisis started with that building that actually drove me to communism, which is the headquarters for the French Communist Party. So to me, what was very interesting is like how architects had to promote or helped promote the kind of updating of two ideologies, communism and modernism, which blossom in architecture, of course.

29:37How could they update both and recon with that crisis, which is precisely the crisis that triggers the rise of postmodernism, right? So I decided to start with the Fifth Republic. So this is a moment for France when de Gaulle becomes the president again. And it's also a moment of mass production. I mean, if in the Reconstruction, there is, of course, the production of housing. That is the moment when France really starts to expand.

30:07So what happened to communism and modernism at that moment? And I tell the story from that perspective of a network of architects, not all of them, but a very restricted group of architects who decided to really test the limits of formal innovation for architecture. They still wanted to carry the spirit of the avant-garde. So, you know, of the same way as the situation is international, like they still had that spirit of how the left-wing ideas have informed cultural production,

30:40but also the usefulness of that expertise of urban design, architectural design, as a kind of explicit political tool, which is something that communists really learned how to do since those interwar years and engage with, you know, because the French Communist Party never really ruled France, but it was very active in those territories. So we had a lot of expertise in the realm of local politics. So when I called Concrete Alliance, concrete was the material they wanted to stick with

31:14because they refused to comply with the idea that communism, sorry, that modernism was serving capitalism in a way. They really wanted to stick to the kind of, you know, avant-garde moment of modernism. And on the other hand, you know, communism had to reinvent itself after, you know, after what Tony Judd precisely said, this past imperfect, you know, like when intellectuals started to denounce communism. And so to me, the concrete alliance is really this alliance between this network of architects

31:49and the mayors and the civil servants and, you know, party apparatchik and also a kind of more broader conversation where architecture is not really restricted to its own institutions, but actually engaged with a broader intellectual conversation. So to me, this is what the concrete alliance is about. And of course, there was a lot of criticism and a lot of communist dissidents at the time

32:21who were criticizing the ways in which, you know, communism was complicit with Stalinism. And so Annick Régel, who was a former communist, she came up with this idea of the communist counter-society and really showing how, you know, there were limits to the ways in which, you know, they could pretend that, you know, a kind of communist society could be realized in France. And of course, she was very critical of the ways in which his architects took to communism.

32:55How could they justify, you know, Stalinism? And how could they be so faithful to the Kremlin? So, and I thought it was a very productive idea to come up with, to investigate those architects as a kind of communist counter-society. It's a really interesting idea, the counter-society thing that you've mentioned and you write about in the book. This idea that, as I understand it, it's about the formation of a sort of network, almost like a rhizomatic political entity. One that eschews the statist, top-down, Stalinist, communist model

33:30in favour of something that's more incremental and granular. To go back to it, much more situationist, much more situated. Yes. I think that's a really wonderful idea.

Architects Operating in Local Politics

33:40How does an architect, who by their very nature are sort of bound to institutional processes, even the title itself, even the nature of the profession as profession, is to all intents and purposes institutional. How does this start manifesting? How do architects operate in this space? And how does the architecture and city form that they propose embody this kind of neopolitics, this post-bourgeois, post-beaux-arts idea,

34:12but also post-Stalinist, post-Leninist kind of totalitarianism? Yeah, I was very interested in the ways in which they became very close to this network of mayors. Because the one thing that is very interesting about the kind of banlieue Parisienne and the red suburbs of France, how many of the mayors were part of the resistance. So they were very kind of disobedient in a way. They were not the kind of most faithful communist members.

34:43And therefore, they were not in the central committee, you know, in the kind of operating from the headquarters. They were really part of this more diffused and rhizomatic, as you say, network of, you know, elected officials in those territories. They were normally from those territories. They were normally like members of the working class. And so they were in a way disobedient in the sense that they would engage with those architects to create something that was very local, trying to do something that was very bottom up, less technocratic, you know, involved with the community.

35:17So it was a very much, a very interesting experience of local politics. You know, even though the communists, you know, one interesting thing about the book is that you know, gradually, those municipalities, those territories were very, very important for communists, but they refused to accept the idea that, you know, it became a logo, a slogan for the Socialist Party of Mitterrand, which was created in 1972, to change the city, to change life. The communists refused that motto because they, for sure, used to say that first you do the revolution,

35:52then life can change, right? But nevertheless, this is not what they exercised in France, because they really tried to promote, in a way, social change, welfare, access to culture through, like, city politics. And I would say the kind of spatial politics that came with it. And so, so much so that they became, some of the architects who were working with those networks, they became experts in dealing with municipal politics. And when this kind of, the new left that emerged in the 70s with François Mitterrand,

36:28really kind of engaging with what Grégory Busquet, who was a sociologist in France, called the urbanization of the political discourse. You know, when they tried to kind of promote that kind of politics, especially in a place like Grenoble, for example, they called some of those communist architects of the Concrete Alliance to work with them, because they had that expertise. So it was a very interesting kind of urban experiment in the ways in which those mayors were also reelected for 25 years. So they were really operating those territories for so long.

36:59So those architects had the chance to really implement a very dedicated urban, a series of urban experiments designing, you know, theaters, for example.

37:13Valentin Fabre and Jean Perrotet, who were, I would say, members of the Concrete Alliance. Well, they all died. And I had the privilege of meeting all of them and interviewing them. And so they became experts in designing theaters in the Banlieue Parisienne, because theater was such an important vehicle for communist, I would say, even propaganda. But there were so many, you know, theater companies in those cities, and they started to develop all those. They gained expertise.

37:44And the funny thing, of course, is that because the counter society had to resist throughout the post-war years, eventually those architects actually gained Paris and started to design buildings in Paris. So that's the story of that, you know, engagement with local politics that I tell in the book, and how, you know, there is a real investment in housing. I would say that, you know, I think in one of the kind of questions that you asked me to come up with about the kind of main lessons of this book,

38:14and I do feel like a central lesson for this book is that housing, not only in a techno-political program, but also as a culturally significant one, because housing was not only about dignity, but it was also kind of a cultural program embedded in those territories. The other thing that I find very interesting is that those architects eventually moved to those cities. They were living there, and they were really engaged with the community. So there was a real kind of investment in, as I say, local power, local politics,

38:46and a real, like, I would say, commitment to those territories in the way they also experienced change. Because what de Gaulle did with the Grand Ensemble, you know, these mass housing projects, was also to disrupt those municipalities around Paris, because really he wanted to house the working classes in the outskirts of Paris. So those were, like, top-down, you know, projects that really disrupted the territory of some of those,

39:17you know, communist bastions. And so some of these architects fought against that. And they're really trying to design housing in a way that was less mass produced, and that showed concern with the design of cities, and the ways the cities, the kind of collective memory of those cities, the ways in which, you know, kind of the urban fabric was, you know, being reoriented with de Gaulle's politics of urban renewal, for example, or the mass housing projects that he promoted. So there is this kind of friction between, you know, the design of a city,

39:51the way a city stands as a kind of stronghold for communism, and this kind of top-down politics of mass housing projects. So some of these communist architects had access to those big commissions, but the ones that I studied are the ones that want to resist and really work together with those mayors to promote, you know, to kind of, as I say, like, convey the feeling that the communist counter-society had been realized, at least in a small civic municipal scale. So to me, that is a very kind of positive kind of outcome of those territories,

40:27you know, even though the book is not at all an apology of communism, it's very critical of communism. And I have an anecdote about that, actually. I mean, but I don't know if you want to ask something else before I jump on that. Well, yeah, I am interested because, of course, that's the sort of fantasy that architects, contemporary architects, I think, hold on to, which is this possibility of political agency, that the capacities to design, the design imagination,

41:00has a seat at the table when urbanization, redevelopment, regeneration is occurring. In Britain at the moment, and I don't know what it's like in the United States, but I suspect it's quite similar. And elsewhere in the world, of course, architects are somewhat marginalized from that process, and they're left sort of, by dint of their own desire, I think, to pursue extraordinary buildings for the ultra-wealthy, have found themselves much more marginalized.

41:30I'm kind of interested in how that relationship with political power worked in practice. Did they sit down, were they invited in at the very beginning of political organizing as significant voice, or were they brought in as a way of kind of illustrating a politics? Were they instrumental in leveraging design imagination and design thinking? To go back to your quote from earlier about, you know, architecture articulating a politics,

42:01or making a politics more likely to occur. Were they there? And how did that come about? Was that through, as you say, the relationships with mayors, or was there a groundswell of demand from the working classes, demanding the location of architects in this discourse?

Stigmatization and Alternative Commissions

42:17I mean, in terms of their agency, I think that what happened with these architects, the way I talk about how that counter-society of architects was formed, you know, and I refer, you know, the Communist Party had many cells in different institutions, and one of the cells was formed at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. And from the very, so I go back to those years, you know, the immediate post-war years, when many of those architects already had the kind of record of resistance.

42:48Many of those architects that I studied, like Jean-Renaudi, they participated in political resistance during the war. They were already somehow involved with left-wing ideas. And the kind of, some of them became closer to communism at the École des Beaux-Arts. And very early on, they formed this kind of network. And, of course, they were stigmatized from the start, because on the one hand, you know, they refused to comply with the kind of prix des Roms, you know,

43:21Beaux-Arts, let's say, the Beaux-Arts system in France, which would grant access to public commissions, one, if you're not communist, but two, if you would be like a more Beaux-Arts-oriented architect. These architects were very interested in modernism. They were, you know, engaging with Marcel Lodz, for example, who was a professor at De Bousa. De Bousa had these external ateliers where they would invite more modern architects to teach. And they were somehow attracted to those architects.

43:51And so very early on, they were stigmatized. And they didn't really have access to those big... Some of them did, but not the ones that I study, as I say. I studied for this book the group of architects within the Communist Party who were very much involved in that updating, the aggiornamento, the updating of communism. They were the most progressive wing, the ones invested in the thaw during the Cold War. And those architects, the ones that really wanted to be more experimental in the way they designed the social facilities or housing.

44:24So very early on, what I want to say, when you talk about agency, they were stigmatized, and they were not really granted any of those big commissions. But on the other hand, they had access to that kind of communist counter-society, which was not only... The communists had their own publications, their own press, their own festivals. La Fête de l'Humanité, they had these networks of cities around the main capitals of France, like around Lyon, around Grenoble. So there was a network of mayors.

44:54There was a kind of a cultural apparatus that was very important. The French Communist Party, I mean, it's hard to believe, but at the time was culturally very, very important in France and had those kind of means to promote those ideas. So on the one hand, they were stigmatized, I would say, from this major, you know, top-down national commissions that Charles de Gaulle in the 60s implemented in France with this kind of mass urbanization

45:24of the country, which I would say ran in parallel with, you know, the United Kingdom or other European countries, the kind of boom of, you know, urban expansion in Europe in the 60s. But on the other hand, they had access to this kind of alternative network. So they also had access to commissions. They were able to design, you know, there were no competitions being run in these municipalities. So they could design, keep designing the same cities for decades. So they had their own kind of system

45:57of access to commissions. So they were able to very early on, you know, design housing projects, theaters, schools, headquarters for some of the social services that were in place. So much so that someone who was very, is a kind of a hero in the book, Pulshimitov, who passed away last year, a very important French architect, who was one of the core members of the Concrete Alliance. He was very angry at me because of the way in which he thought

46:27I was historicizing his work as, oh, I could only access those commissions because I was a communist. But there is a truth to that. And of course, he was a great architect too. And eventually he was recognized outside of those circles to the point that he designed, I don't know if you know the building, the Ministry of Financing in Paris, which is the only building that actually is a kind of a horizontal skyscraper that goes inside the Seine. He's the author of that building because he was able to design so much,

46:59thanks to this kind of counter society of architects, that, you know, eventually he was invited to design buildings in Paris when Mitterrand was elected. And that happened to many of those architects. For example, another, you know, so if you ask me if they had agency, I think that they had at the local level. And I think that they also had access to many of those fora. La Nouvelle Critique was a very important journal where they could write.

47:29They were also writing in the L'Humanité, you know, the newspaper that is still run by French communism. And they had access to, you know, they could really disseminate their visions about architecture through those big communication machines that the Communist Party had. The Communist Party even had its own consultancy, network of consultancy, bureau d'études, how they say, talk in France. And so they they were also trying to in a way they had this their own kind of

48:00alternative mode of financing projects. So it was really kind of a counter society in a way that ran within, you know, the kind of French capitalism. But of course, this is, I mean, they were working only with communists run contractors, local contractors. But at some point this exploded, especially with the rise of competitions. You know, at some point mayors could no longer designate their own architects. They had to run architectural competitions and that was kind of,

48:31you know, a trigger for the decline of the of the Concrete Alliance as I as I explain in the book.

Renée Gailhoustet and Housing in Ivry-sur-Seine

48:38But I do feel like, you know, a very interesting case study in my in my book, of course, is, you know, and she's the only I would say female protagonist of the story, Reniga Juste, who's an amazing architect who dedicated her whole life to social housing in Ivry-sur-Seine, but she also designed in Saint-Denis. And, you know, she is one very talented, you know, housing designer who was among

49:08the rare female architects of her time to run her own practice because she became the architect, architect-in-chief of Ivry-sur-Seine. and that was an amazing, you know, experiment, I would say, for housing in France that is very understudied. But I would say that, yes, she gained access to those, you know, to kind of being in charge of all the projects in a city because she was part of that counter-society and the Concrete Alliance. I wanted to finish

49:39on one last question, which is a big and complicated question, which is the concrete in the Concrete Alliance. Why was there this retention of the materiality of the concrete? How was this to some degrees justified or explained? Not that it needs justification in aesthetic or spatial terms, but in terms of its associations with, communistic and Stalinistic forms?

50:10And particularly, how was it engaged with by the residents of these communities themselves, by lay people? Because, of course, we all know that architects and architectural scholars have very odd taste compared with normal people. It has ever been thus, I imagine. And I suppose alongside that conversation around the materiality of it is the broader idea of the, as if you point to in, I think, chapter three, this idea of the, and I'm going to mispronounce this,

50:41although I probably should be able to pronounce it, this idea of the aggiornamento, this idea of the updating. Was that an effective updating at the level of its reception by the public?

The Aggiornamento of Communism and Modernism

50:55What is very interesting for me before I talk about concrete is the aggiornamento as an idea of, I mean, on the one hand, the Italian term is used as reference to the Vatican Council of 1962 when the church had to renew itself or it would completely lose it. So, and this is, you know, historians of communism, they like to use the term. It's not me. Historians of communism in France, they refer to that period

51:25as aggiornamento and it has to do with this renewal of the church. So a major ideology of the Roman Catholic Church had to renew its methods and also its kind of spatial politics because church design actually was at the center of the renovation of the Roman Catholic Church. You know, stemming from Italy, you know, churches became, you know, the kind of distance between the priest and the general audience was kind of,

51:57you know, the church design actually tried to bring together, you know, the church, the priest to the people. You know, there was a real renewal that actually had to do with church design and architecture. The question of, you know, the whole conversation that Le Corbusier had with the Dominican priests, so interesting. So I was very interested in the ways in which there was this reciprocity between, you know, church, the Roman Catholic Church, this big ideology

52:27which struggles with updating to this day and the ways in which that implied also the kind of church design, church architecture and the ways in which the Communist Party had to, no longer had that record of resistance when I decided to engage with this, you know, with this history. The beginning of the end, let's say, when they were in the apogee but also had to renew its means and the ways in which architecture could serve as this testing ground for,

52:58you know, the renewal. How can you, how can, you know, political change be designated by architecture? Does it have to do with the image? Does it have to do with the space? So to me, that was very interesting, the kind of tasks that those architects took for themselves, starting from the headquarters for the French Communist Party, which was the kind of, you know, the main symbol of that renewal. But what I show in the book is that, was Nehemiah,

53:28in fact, you know, representative of that renewal? And I thought that, you know, there was a disjunction between the image they wanted to convey, actually, when they chose to kind of embrace one of the last living architects of a kind of modern avant-garde that arrived in France in the mid-60s, precisely in 65, precisely the year that Le Corbusier died, you know, and the kind of putting into crisis of modernism is very interesting.

53:59So that story already starts in a very controversial way because modernism was already not representing,

Concrete as Material and Political Commitment

54:07you know,

Concrete as Material and Political Commitment

54:08this idea of change. And they decided to embrace concrete as a material, even though, of course, I talk about the briques rouges, which is about, you know, I feel like for Skarnemeyer, you know, concrete represented the freedom of form, you know, the kind of inventiveness of architecture, rupture with functionalism. So for them, you know, I would say that concrete represented this alliance between progressive idea, utopian ideas, and the avant-garde of architecture.

54:39Because even though Le Corbusier was blamed for all the kind of homogeneity of the built environment in France, he was not the one who designed those buildings, right? He designed unité d'habitation, but the mass housing projects, which somehow were inspired by the Athens Charter, were not designed by him. And I feel like those architects thought that the avant-garde was betrayed by that mass production of space in France. So the way I see it also by interviewed René Gaillouste or Paul Shimetov, you know, I really had the chance

55:09to immerse myself in a kind of ethnography of that generation and engage with them. I understood that concrete for them was a very important material. And of course, today there are many implications and demolitions involved in the buildings that refer to this network of architects that I studied. So, but it's a very, you know, the ways in which the urban renewal of Yves-sur-Seine takes shape is very interesting because precisely, you know, René Gaillouste, who was in charge of that experiment,

55:39struggled a lot to convince, you know, the local people who were proud of the workerist environment that they had, the red bricks that referred to the, you know, usines, to the factories. They had a lot of trouble to accept an environment shaped with concrete. And so that is a very interesting story that I tell in my last chapter, which is the kind of last moment in which the Concrete Alliance tries to update,

56:10you know, both communism, modernism, almost to the point of becoming postmodern or of becoming almost one of the radical leftist, you know, groups like the Socialist Party. They really engaged with some of those ideas. They really wanted to kind of change, but nevertheless still stick to the Communist Party. There was a lot of resistance to accept that the reshaping of that communist bastion, which is really the main stronghold

56:40of the French Communist Party to this day. I mean, it's 101 years of municipal communism. So it's been 101 years that a communist mayor rules Ivry-sur-Seine, which is not the case for other municipal cities or municipal communist bastions that I talk about in my book. But Ivry is really the kind of main stronghold of the French Communist Party. And thanks to her and Jean-Renaudy, they really reshaped the center city to become this,

57:11what we now refer to as eco-brutalism, because of course it's an environment shaped with concrete, but that actually also gave birth to a sort of like mountainous, I don't know if you've been to Ivry-sur-Seine, but they designed this triangle-shaped terraces, almost like conveying piled houses.

57:34And it became really a kind of what we refer to now, like it is in the press because there is a renewed interest in René-Gayosté and we refer to that kind of language as eco-brutalism. Because at the time they wanted to really give, you know, the workers of Ivry, very well-thought apartments that were not mass-produced. They thought there is no mass use, no, how do they say? There is no

58:06user type for an apartment type. They were really against that. So that leveling of communism that everyone is the same was kind of being questioned by them, you know, in favor of diversity, even though they didn't use that term. But concrete, so they were really trying to come to terms with this idea of, you know, universality that both communism and modernism relied upon to design this very kind of, you know, to cater for different groups

58:37and different users, almost becoming the opposite of what communism stood for. But for them, concrete was what referred back to that. And they were also operating within a communist municipality. So I feel like that concrete has that meaning for them as this material substance, you know, that also made them connected to the kind of heroes of the modern movement. But of course, I mean, in English, it works well to talk about concrete

59:08as this very real, the real politics of municipal communism, which doesn't work in French, for example. I'm actually about to publish my book in French and this doesn't stand because, you know, it's béton, not concrete. So I can't use the kind of, you know, the pun doesn't really stand. So I have another title for the book in French. But to me, the realness of architecture as a real political tool is also something

59:38very important for the concrete. And also, like going back to Althusser, you know, where he says that concrete subjects prescribe, material practices when he discusses ideology is very interesting because many of these architects, for example, after May 68, including René Gaiustin and Jean Renaud Di, they didn't renew their party membership. They were so critical of communism, the ways the Communist Party was complicit with the gulags, you know, invaded Hungary. So they really didn't want to

1:00:10support that at the kind of international level. but they still were engaged with communism in the local level. So they were still operating, you know, she was living in Ivry, working with the mayors, working with the civil servants, but she no longer had a party membership after 68.

Lessons from the Concrete Alliance Today

1:00:29Where does this leave us? Yeah. What do we take forward out of this story that you've told? And I know this is a difficult question for historians because often enough we try and stand back from things and let it stand on its own legs. But I think it's an important question. Yeah. I do feel like, so I, yeah, I, when you asked me this question, I had, I love to reflect about that because I feel like there is a lot of, you never, you know, this is a 15-year-old

1:01:00project for me, took me so many years. And when you finally come up with the book, there is a real engagement with the present, right? Why is this relevant today? Why are you telling the story today? So as I mentioned before, I really think that this book at its core examines the, the Communist Party's commitment to culture and to social housing. And of course, I talk about Paris because of the headquarters for the French Communist Party, but it's ultimately about the municipal sphere, right? And I, I feel like

1:01:30there is so much conversation about housing even in the United States, which is, wasn't the case, I would say 15 years ago, but, you know, there is a real conversation as a professor in a master's program. I know that the second year of the master's program, my students engage with housing, right? Affordable housing, such a contentious topic. So I do feel like, as I said, this book carries this lesson about housing understood not merely as a techno-political program, but one that is spatial, a social project, invested in culture.

1:02:02And I do feel like that housing in this context is really expected to perform in serious ideological and kind of human work. So creating this kind of form of sociability that would somehow engage with a political party. And I would also like to state that, as I said before, you know, publishing a book that has communism on its cover, it's really not an apology. My book, the French communists used to call me social democrat when I was interviewing them. So it's, it's, it's really not.

1:02:33And I feel like it's really about this complex history and also trying to show how, you know, in, in, in years following World War II in Europe, in some countries, this party was so culturally important in Italy and in France, you know, so many artists were members of the party. And at some point they broke with the party, of course, because of what came up in relation to the history of, of Soviet politics. And Yale even raised

1:03:03the possibility of removing the word from the title. Like, you know, at some point they asked me, let's name the book Architecture and Ideology. But to me, it was very important to have communism on the title because this is really, I would say, the only account in book form of this experience of Western communism thought through the lens of the built environment. And that, and how the spatial history is very indispensable because the specialization of that party in France, the way it really,

1:03:33was able to convince, you know, workers about the relevance of that party politics was through its spatial politics. And it also had to do with the fact that after the industrialization, perhaps that message didn't resonate anymore with the incoming inhabitants of the party, which are the migrants coming from North African colonies. So the book also tells this kind of like archaeology of the bonlieue Parisienne, I would say, from that perspective and how, you know,

1:04:05some of the, you know, the fate of some of these projects actually was related to the process of the industrialization. I do feel like the ghosts of the Cold War are still, you know, lingering. And there's a lot of conversation about demolishing buildings in the United States. Today, there are modern in the sea that have to do with that history. So, and many of these buildings are actually being demolished in France as we speak. So this is also a book that brings back

1:04:35the history of the meaningfulness of those buildings representing, you know, that moment of culture, that moment of intellectual history of France. And I also feel like there is a kind of, you know, the protagonists of this book are very much associated with what historian Jacques Lucan, who passed away in 2023, referred to as brutalisme à la française, the French brutalism. So it's a French inflection of brutalism and the ways in which it was socially committed,

1:05:06politically engaged, and also formally invented. And so I would say there is a real, I don't know if you agree with me because, of course, you are based in a country that has a lot to say about brutalism. But I would say, of course, these buildings, as I said, you know, Lacaton et Vassalle became very famous in France because they would say never demolish. And some of these buildings that I study here are being demolished at this point. And so I think that it has to do with the kind of crisis of brutalism, the disdain for brutalism.

1:05:37Nevertheless, I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, in the last 15 years, there seems to be an emerging discourse around brutalism. Now we call eco-brutalism. So just to tell you that Owen Hopkins, whom I think you may know, and I are actually exploring a forthcoming issue of architectural design called eco-brutalism. And René Gailluste will be a central character in this issue, which is, of course, about the present, but has many kind of historical reflections.

1:06:10And I mean, is it nostalgia? But I do feel like there is a kind of idea of redirecting the transformative energy embedded in those projects toward contemporary, environmentally meaningful agendas, even though they're very carbon intensive. But, you know, demolishing them perhaps is not the right response. So really, how to maintain? And I would say that, you know, the fact that some of these buildings are being demolished today has to do, on the one hand, with their ideological content, but also the lack of maintenance that, you know, we see in many

1:06:40housing projects in Europe and some of those social, those buildings. So I would say that the one lesson that I feel like the book carries is that at the heart of the book, of course, the tension between the formal ambition and political commission, I would say, was never resolved because they were inside France and, you know, France was becoming very much, you know, a conglomerate of like contractors, like Buig, you know, and capitalism was really blossoming, gentrification was taking shape.

1:07:11So they never abandoned that effort, I would say. And so I think that that refusal is kind of the legacy of the history. I feel like today architects in the United States, for example, are unionizing. There is kind of design justice, reframing questions of whom architecture serves. So there's also a fantasy of a neutral or a political practice becoming untenable. So I do feel like these municipal experiments of the PCF or French Communist Party offer something rather than a model.

1:07:42So it's a precedent, right? And so it's not a blueprint, but it's really a proof of that sustained local political commitment can produce architecture of a kind of a genuine social ambition, even, you know, in spite of capitalism, federal support, and being very imperfect. I mean, they designed a shopping mall that had a critique of consumerism on its facade. I don't know if you remember the project, you know, Grand Place, which is this mall

1:08:13in, you know, in Grenoble. So they tried, and I feel like this is a very interesting kind of, you know, ambition for architecture. Brilliant. That's an even more perfect point to finish on. Thank you so much.

1:08:32Come friendly bombs and fall on slough to get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now. The earth exhales. That's Pert and professional sourpuss John Betchman, waning lyrical in 1936 on modernism's English failures. Perhaps it worked out better under the pinkos in France. Who knows? Thank you to Vanessa for the chat. Good things like this take time to happen, but I thought it worth the effort. Thanks to Lizzie Curtin at Yale University Press for the book and intro. Please see the podcast description for links to the book, to Vanessa at work

1:09:02and to podcast subscription options. And thanks for listening.