The mid-1960s saw a growing number of manifestations of crisis. Le Corbusier's death in 1965 coincided with the exhaustion of a modern discourse corrupted by large-scale housing projects and urban renewal, while the timidly reformed teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected by more and more students. While utopian ventures proliferated, the occupation of the Beaux-Arts in May-June 1968 precipitated the closure of the architecture department, followed by the creation of new schools, where pedagogies were developed that placed great emphasis on theory, social sciences and methods.
Professionals who rejected both commercial or bureaucratic practice and paper architecture founded new types of multidisciplinary collectives, such as the Atelier de Montrouge and the Atelier d'urbanisme et d'architecture, in which the social sciences were welcomed.
After the shock of 1968, a new public policy was put in place under the banner of innovation. The new towns in the Paris region, where the preoccupation with urbanity was becoming increasingly apparent, provided the ideal setting, as did initiatives such as the Programme Architecture Nouvelle (New Architecture Program), which enabled young architects trained in a critical perspective to secure their first commissions.
French architecture then became porous to the most contradictory contributions - from the ecological alternative of West Coast communities in the United States to Italian typo-morphology, while the agencies of British municipalities fascinated advocates of public workshops.
