In the early 1950s, the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning led by Eugène Claudius-Petit, with the help of Pierre Dalloz and Paul Herbé, succeeded in forcing the transition of housing production to the industrial age, through contracts negotiated with major companies.
Deployed according to the broad compositions of their floor plans, the large-scale housing projects used either the recoverable formwork-tunnel technique, or Raymond Camus' prefabricated panels, whose patents were exported worldwide, and which only a few designers, such as Jean Dubuisson, managed to use with finesse.
From 1953 onwards, Georges Candilis and a handful of young professionals were engaged in criticizing the orthodoxy of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, and armed with their experience in North Africa, they echoed the research carried out in Europe by the members of Team 10, proposing alternative morphologies to those of the axial or serial plans of large housing estates.
Despite the commitment of magazines such as Elle and La Maison française, and the seductive, if ambiguous, image portrayed in Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle, the modern house remained a rarity, carried exclusively by an original and marginal clientele.
In addition to the production of large-scale housing estates in the suburbs, the renovation of the city centers began. In the case of Paris, the La Défense, Front-de-Seine and Maine-Montparnasse operations marked a leap in scale in urban transformation, materializing an urbanism in which the artificial ground of slabs was superimposed on the old city.
