The Paris Housing Crisis and A Social Re

The Paris Housing Crisis and a Social Revolution
in Domestic Architecture on the Eve

of the First World War*
Caroline Ford
University of California, Los Angeles
It is thus logically by and for the people that the present change in
architecture is being brought about.1 (Henry Provensal)
From the nineteenth century onward, social reformers, politicians, and the pub-
lic at large began to decry both a growing housing shortage and the insalubrious
condition of France’s capital city. As early as the 1820s a governmental study of
housing shortages found that between 1804 and 1827 the population of Paris
had increased from 547,756 to 890,431, but available housing had not kept
pace, which resulted in significant overcrowding. While the population density
per hectare was 159 in 1800, it had risen to 307 by 1846, and housing in the city
was “no longer commensurate with the number of inhabitants.”2 Moreover, the
problems were worse in the city’s poorer districts, where rents were exorbitant.
Following several cholera epidemics and a sharp rise in the number of cases of
tuberculosis during the course of the nineteenth century, the issue of housing
also became one of public hygiene.3 The cholera epidemic of 1832 claimed
18,602 victims in Paris alone, and the issues of overcrowding, inadequate san-
itation, and insalubrious housing could not be ignored. By 1865 the utopian so-
cialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote that “the home of the citizen, of the com-
mon man, has not yet been built. We don’t have a minimum of housing any
* I wish to thank Jean-Louis Cohen for his early suggestions regarding this project
and Marie-Jeanne Dumont for graciously discussing archival sources and printed collec-
tions, as well as her own pathbreaking work on this subject. I thank Emma Rothschild
for facilitating access to the Rothschild family archives as well as Melanie Aspey and the
archives’ staff in London. I also wish to acknowledge the anonymous readers for JMH,
whose comments were invaluable.
1
Henry Provensal, “L’esthétique de nos rues: IV, L’architecture du peuple,” La vie
normale, no. 11 (June 5, 1905): 11.
2
Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First
Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Princeton, NJ, 1973), 186.
3
Roger-Henri Guerrand, Les origines du logement social en France, 1850–1914
(Paris, 2010), 32–33.
The Journal of Modern History 90 (September 2018): 580–620
© 2018 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2018/9003-0003$10.00
All rights reserved.
A Social Revolution in Parisian Domestic Architecture 581
more than we have a minimum wage. . . . If the municipal authorities in charge

of art and architecture don’t know how to house us affordably, I have no time
for architecture and those municipal authorities.”4
While cries of alarm concerning urban blight gave rise in part to a vast scheme
to rebuild the city of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, in what came to be known as
the “Haussmannization” of the capital under Baron Georges Haussmann, prefect
of the Seine, the creation of new residential buildings for a largely bourgeois cli-
entele and the construction of new sanitation systems did not fundamentally ad-
dress housing shortages among the poor, the working classes, and the middle
class with modest means or the often miserable conditions in which they lived.5
Haussmannization, a project that resulted in the building of grand monuments
that included an opera house and national library, only exacerbated the existing
housing crisis, dismantling historic neighborhoods and pushing significant seg-
ments of the working-class population from the city’s center to the periphery and
suburbs. Napoleon III had made a few symbolic efforts to address the problem of
working-class housing in constructing his cité ouvrière in the rue de Roche-
chouart in Paris, but that structure looked more like a military barracks or a hos-
pital than an apartment house, and its residents were handed a set of regulations
to match. Following the fall of the Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War,
affordable and salubrious housing became the subject of intense debate and
scrutiny. One commentator observed that “three-fourths of the Parisian popula-
tion continue living in courtyards that are virtually wells, the air of which re-
mains constantly unchanged, or in narrow, ill-ventilated streets.”6
Paris was not the only capital city that confronted a housing crisis in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and the issue was addressed in distinctive ways in
different national contexts and at different moments in time.7 The French were
4
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, 2nd ed.
(Paris, 1875), 351–52.
5
Alexia Yates has recently suggested that there was a boom in residential construc-
tion in the early Third Republic, but she focuses almost exclusively on the construction
of maisons de rapport, investment rental properties for the well-heeled. Yates, Selling
Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-Siécle Capital (Cambridge, MA,
2015). The crise du logement generated an enormous amount of commentary during
the Third Republic. On the housing and building crisis in Paris during these years, see,
e.g., Maurice Halbwachs, Les expropriations et les prix des terrains à Paris (1860–
1900) (Paris, 1909); Etienne Videcoq, Aspects permanents de la crise du logement dans
la région parisienne (Paris, 1932); and Emile Fender, La crise du batiment dans la région
parisienne (Paris, 1935).
6
Henri Frantz, “The Rothschild Artizans’ Dwellings in Paris designed by Augustin
Rey,” Studio: International Art, no. 156 (March 1906): 115.
7
For a comparative study of housing reform in Germany and France in this period, see
Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and
France, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1985). The construction of social housing on a mass
582 Ford
well aware of the housing and urban planning initiatives taken by their neigh-
bors in Britain, Germany, and Austria in the decades before the First World
War and worried that they lagged behind them. Robert de Souza, the poet and
urbanist, wrote in 1913 that he did not need to go to London “to realize that
the French municipal enterprise had been completely outstripped by foreign
countries, and especially by the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany
and Austria.”8 Britain began to address the issue of working-class housing rel-
atively early in the nineteenth century and was at the vanguard of the garden city
movement led by Ebenezer Howard, which was closely studied by French social
reformers. Anthony Sutcliffe has outlined the model of the “Anglo-Saxon” city
in England, where the residential density in city centers was comparatively low
as more prosperous populations gravitated to the suburbs. Housing initiatives fa-
vored the building of the self-contained cottage for workers.9 Different physical,
economic, and political conditions in many well-established cities in continental
Europe militated against the adoption of the English model of the self-contained
cottage, except in suburban areas or new industrial centers. In Berlin, Vienna,
and Paris, multistoried apartment blocks—or, as the mayor of Brussels, Charles
Buls, disparagingly described them, “large barracks divided into apartments”—
were the norm rather than the exception.10 For this reason, attempts at urban re-
newal initiatives targeted the redesign of existing urban blocks, rather than the
comprehensive planning of new housing settlements.11
The early Third Republic marked a significant turning point in terms of how
the French came to address the lack of affordable and salubrious housing for the
poor and the working class, and many of their efforts were centered on Paris.
Like their counterparts in the cities of Berlin and Vienna, French politicians
and social reformers before the First World War generally favored private solu-
tions by supporting philanthropic rather than state-sponsored initiatives. This
scale did not take off in Austria until after the First World War and coincided with the
ascent of the political Left, while in Germany initiatives had been launched in the mid-
nineteenth century but gained momentum during the Weimar Republic. See Eve Blau,
The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge, MA, 1999); and Christine
Mengin, Guerre du toit et modernité architecturale: Loger l’employé sous la république
de Weimar (Paris, 2007).
8
Quoted in Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the
United States and France, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 1981), 126. Robert de Souza, Nice, cap-
ital d’hiver (Paris, 1913).
9
Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, 47–87; and M. J. Daunton, ed., Housing the
Workers, 1850–1914 (London, 1990), 7.
10
Charles Buls, L’esthétique des villes (Brussels, 1894), 28.
11
The importance of the reformed urban block has, according to Wolfgang Sonne, been
downplayed in discussions of the emergence of urban modernism. See Sonne, “Dwelling in
the Metropolis: Urbanity as a Paradigm, 1890–1940,” Positions, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 122–
45.
preference came to be enshrined in the Siegfried Law of 1894 and the Strauss
Law of 1906, which facilitated the construction of habitations à bon marché
(HBM, or low-cost housing) through financial incentives.12 Both before and af-
ter the laws’ passage, a number of philanthropic building societies were formed
to tackle the problem, including the Société des logements populaires hygié-
niques, the Société des logements hygiéniques à bon marché, and the Fondation
Weill. In contrast to Napoleon III’s approach, these societies increasingly took
into account the predilections of the population that they sought to house by
paying greater attention to their comfort, and they laid the groundwork for state-
sponsored drives to create public housing after the devastation caused by World
War I. Nonetheless, much less attention has been devoted to housing reform ini-
tiatives during the Third Republic and the role of architects in shaping them, in
contrast to the plethora of studies on Haussmannization and the rebuilding of
France after 1945.13 Moreover, historians who have explored social housing in
a comparative European context in the period from the late nineteenth century
to the Second World War have tended to examine the phenomenon in terms of
the history of housing policy, urban planning, and the living conditions of the
12
The term was used for the first time in 1889 at the first international congress de-
voted to habitations à bon marché, and in 1894 the Conseil supérieur du travail called
for its substitution in place of habitations ouvrières, which had negative connotations for
many. However, some architects and philanthropists refused to use the term because
they thought that it called the quality of their housing into question. Marie-Jeanne Du-
mont, Le logement social à Paris, 1850–1930: Les habitations à bon marché (Liège,
1991), 152.
13
Haussmannization has been the subject of a vast historical literature. See David H.
Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ, 1972); David P. Jor-
dan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995);
and Stephane Kirkland, Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann and the Quest
to Build a Modern City (New York, 2013). For discussions of postwar reconstruction,
see Roger H. Duclaud-Williams, The Politics of Housing in Britain and France (Lon-
don, 1978); Cecil O. Smith Jr., “The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in
France; Plans for Renewal,” American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (June 1990): 657–
92; Danièle Voldman, La reconstruction des villes françaises de 1940 à 1954: Histoire
d’une politique (Paris, 1997); Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar
France (Minneapolis, 2014); Nicole Rudolph, At Home in Postwar France: Modern
Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (New York, 2015); and Minayo Nasiali, Native
to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship and Everyday Life in Marseille (Ithaca, NY,
2016). Far less attention has been devoted to the Third Republic, especially in recent
years, even though Guerrand’s Les origines du logement, first published in 1987, was
a pioneering work in this regard. It was followed by Jean-Paul Flamand’s Loger le
peuple: Essai sur l’histoire du logement social (Paris, 1989), which surveys housing re-
form from the 1830s to the 1980s. Ann Louise Shapiro’s Housing the Poor in Paris,
1850–1902 (Madison, WI, 1985) explored the issue with regard to Paris. Dumont’s com-
prehensive Le logement social à Paris surveys a much longer period in greater depth.
584 Ford
working class.14 With the notable exception of Jeanne-Marie Dumont, historians

have been less concerned with how the response to the housing crisis was shaped
by the architects who ultimately came to design new forms of domestic architec-
ture for the working poor and middle classes with modest means.15 Yet, French
architects did increasingly turn their attention to domestic architecture in the wan-
ing years of the Second Empire and during the early years of the Third Republic.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who is well known for his attempt to reform the curric-
ulum in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and to restore the architectural
vestiges of France’s medieval heritage, began to focus on the subject in the late
1850s.16 In 1875, he published L’histoire de l’habitation humaine, and in 1889
the architect Charles Garnier designed a pavilion at the Paris Exposition Univer-
selle that showcased human habitation around the world.17 Some discussion of
domestic architecture for the working class also found its way toward the end
of the nineteenth century into architectural treatises, where it had once been ab-
sent. By 1911, Louis Cloquet, who devoted the fourth volume of his Traité
d’architecture to habitations privées et collectives, noted that the working class
had now begun to desire “the good things in life: it lays claim to its place in the
sun. It is urgent to help it to acquire at the very least decent hygienic housing.”18
14
See Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City; Shapiro, Housing the Poor in Paris;
Daunton, Housing the Workers; and Christian Topalov, Le logement en France: Histoire
d’une marchandise impossible (Paris, 1987).
15
Bullock and Read devote sections to architectural design in their comprehensive
study of the housing reform movement in Germany and France in Movement for Housing
Reform in Germany and France, 110–54, 374–410, as does Flamand in Loger le peuple.
Paul Rabinow focuses on modernist technocrats and Catholic reformers in French Modern:
Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1995), highlighting the work of ur-
ban planners, rather than architects, primarily in the garden city movement in Suresnes and
in urban projects in Morocco in the interwar period. Jean-Louis Cohen also explores new
strategies in domestic architecture in this period in his synthetic overview of architectural
modernism in France from 1889 to the 2000s in France: Modern Architectures in History
(London, 2015), 30–35. Dumont’s Le logement social à Paris is one of the few works that
explicitly focuses on the architectural history of social housing.
16
An article entitled “Maison” was published in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire
raisonné de l’architecture du XIe au XVIe siècle, vol. 4 (Paris, 1863), and secs. 17–19 of
his Entretiens de l’architecture (Paris, 1863) were devoted to domestic architecture.
17
For a recent reconsideration of Viollet-le-Duc’s writing on domestic architecture,
see Viollet-le-Duc: Villégiature et architecture domestique, ed. Viviane Delpech (Paris,
2016). Charles Garnier and A. Ammann published a kind of catalog of the Paris Expo-
sition exhibit several years later as L’habitation humaine (Paris, 1892).
18
Louis Cloquet, Traité d’architecture, vol. 4, Habitations privées et collectives (Liège,
1911), 90. Monique Eleb and Anne Debarre, L’invention de l’habitation moderne: Paris,
1880 –1914 (Paris, 1995), and Architectures de la vie privée: Maisons et mentalités, XVIIe–
XIXe siècles (Paris, 1999), explore this newfound interest in domestic architecture toward
the end of the nineteenth century.
The concerns of architects dovetailed with those of private philanthropic foun-

dations in Paris, which drew on the talents of a new generation of young architects
to construct affordable housing for the working class that would ultimately have a
significant impact on innovations in domestic architecture for all social classes and
on how architects began to reconsider their role and to exercise their profession in
France. Architects increasingly came to articulate their aesthetic goals in a lan-
guage of hygiene, emphasizing the central importance of ventilation, sunlight,
and green spaces, while arguing that architecture should also have a social mis-
sion. They were not alone among artists in France during this period in their com-
mitment to a “social art,” but they made their own unique contribution to it, inau-
gurating what might be called a social revolution in domestic architecture by using
architectural design as a technique of social intervention.19 This revolution was
“hygienic” in its orientation because the health of the urban working class was
at the center of new concerns about architectural design.20 However, it also re-
flected a new interest in how architectural design could shape social relationships
in a preexisting urban environment. The hygienic and social agenda of architects
and reformers had far-reaching implications for larger discussions concerning the
relationship between the built and the natural environment, the role of the profes-
sional architect, and by implication the educational institutions that trained him—
and eventually her—in France.21 This revolution in domestic architecture pio-
neered the use of new building materials, including reinforced concrete (beton
armé) instead of hewn stone ( pierre de taille), new architectural forms, and an aes-
thetic sobriety that ultimately constituted a rejection of both the art nouveau cel-
ebrated in the Paris exhibition of 1900 and the classical style of the Ecole des
Beaux Arts.22 It was clearly in evidence in what some observers came to call
19
For a discussion of the idea of l’art social in this period, see L’art social en France
de la Révolution à la grande guerre, ed. Neil McWilliam, Catherine Méneux, and Julie
Ramos (Rennes, 2014), particularly the contributions by Stephanie Pallini Strohm, “Jean
Lahor: De l’art pour le peuple à l’art populaire,” 263–80; and Catherine Méneux, “Roger
Marx et l’institutionalisation de l’art social,” 323– 42.
20
See Brian Brace Taylor, “Henri Sauvage and Hygienic Housing; or, The Cleanli-
ness Revolution in Paris,” Architèse, no. 12 (1974): 13–29. For a discussion of how
thinking about the environment shaped the rise of modern architecture in Germany in
the same period, see Kenny Kupers, “Bodenständigkeit: The Environmental Epistemol-
ogy of Modernism,” Journal of Architectural History 21, no. 8 (2016): 1226–52.
21
An American, Julia Morgan, was the first woman to be admitted to the Ecole des
Beaux Arts in 1898. Women were a very small minority in the years that followed. Mer-
edith Clausen, “The Ecole des Beaux Arts: Toward a Gendered History,” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 2 (June 2010): 153–61.
22
Commenting on the evolution of Paris in the early twentieth century, Marcel Poëte,
one of the founding fathers of the new discipline of urbanism in France, wrote that “the era
of the social city is dawning. . . . The use of new materials that had not yet been commonly
used for building, the adoption of new architectural forms, a concern for logic in construc-
586 Ford
Paris’s “Louvre of social housing,” a low-cost housing project sponsored by a

philanthropic foundation established by the French branch of the Rothschild fam-
ily in 1905, which was in many ways at the forefront of this revolution.23 Indeed,
Henri Frantz, who commented on the “Rothschild artizans’ dwellings in Paris” for
the journal Studio: International Art, summed up the winning architectural design
for the project as representing “a real revolution which must profoundly influence
feeling in general as regards the comfort and hygiene of the block-dwelling.”24
Some of the young architects who spearheaded this revolution and propagated
a new architectural aesthetic also became associated with the “modern” move-
ment in the 1920s and 1930s. This new aesthetic stressed simplicity, harmony,
and the integration of the built environment into the natural environment. Many
of these young architects would also become founding members of the Groupe
des architectes modernes in 1922 and would participate in the 1925 Exposition
des arts décoratifs that launched the art deco style, although the relationship be-
tween the construction of affordable housing before the First World War and
the articulation of many of the principles that came to underpin the modern move-
ment before Le Corbusier has been largely neglected.25
This article explores how a social revolution in domestic architecture in Paris
during this period came about, by focusing specifically on the role of architects
and the forces that influenced them through the lens of the Rothschild Founda-
tion’s “Louvre of social housing.” It examines why architecture and design be-
came a technique of social intervention and how architects redefined their role
in the process. Finally, it compares the case of Paris with the cases of other con-
tinental European cities, most notably Berlin and Vienna, where social reform-
ers and architects faced similar challenges.
The Foundation and the Competition

On June 27, 1904, the three scions of the Rothschild family in Paris—Alphonse,
Gustave, and Edmond de Rothschild—arranged a meeting with France’s minister
of commerce, Georges Trouillet, to announce their intention of making the un-
tion converge in order to address the ideas and satisfy the needs that are arising. Hygiene
gains ground.” Poëte, Une vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours (Paris, 1925), 527.
23
Marie-Jeanne Dumont, “Le’Louvre’ de l’habitat social, le modèle Rothschild,” in
Cent ans d’habitat social: Une utopie réaliste, ed. Roger Quillot and Jean-Henri Guerrand
(Paris, 1989), 79–89. For the Rothschild family’s role as patrons of architecture, see Pau-
line Prevost-Marcilhacy, Les Rothschild: Batisseurs et mécènes (Paris, 1995).
24
Frantz, “Rothschild Artizans’ Dwellings in Paris,” 116. Henri Frantz was a pseu-
donym of Auguste Henri Fritsch-Estrangin, a French art critic.
25
Anthony Sutcliffe, e.g., goes so far as to say that classicism triumphed in the decade
before the First World War and that the “failure of Art Nouveau confirmed that there was
little scope for design alternatives,” arguing that the modernist challenge came only after
the Great War. Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT, 1993), 137.
precedented sum of 10 million francs available for the construction of social hous-
ing for the working classes in Paris. The French government, the city of Paris,
housing experts, and the press greeted the news of the donation with enthusiasm,
and soon thereafter La Fondation Rothschild pour l’amélioration de l’existence
matérielle des travailleurs, which was to oversee the project, was born. The foun-
dation’s professed aim was to work to improve the material conditions of the
workers of France, regardless of religion and political affiliation. The immediate
task of its board of directors, which included some of France’s leading housing
experts at the time—Jules Siegfried, Georges Picot, and Emile Cheysson—was
to procure lots on which to construct new housing for the working classes, to draw
up architectural specifications, and to recruit architects whose plans best con-
formed to them.26
The Rothschild Foundation’s ecumenical initiative was launched in the context
of the prewar housing crisis among the poor in Paris and in the midst of a major
political crisis, the Dreyfus Affair. This was not the Rothschild family’s first phil-
anthropic initiative: it had long played an active role in the Jewish communities of
both Paris and London. In 1852, the barons’ father, James de Rothschild, had al-
ready established the Rothschild Hospital, which was followed by a series of clin-
ics, hospices, orphanages, dispensaries, and sanatoriums. In 1872, the family also
created an annual fund of 100,000 francs, which by 1900 had come to be known as
the “Secours Rothschild,” that was distributed to the mayors of the city’s arron-
dissements for families who were at risk of falling behind in the payment of rent.27
The Rothschild dynasty had also helped to finance the building of the synagogue
of St. Victoire, a Jewish hospital, an orphanage, and a Hebrew primary school and
had provided scholarships for the needy. Indeed, Michael Marrus has observed
that the Rothschild family devoted itself to philanthropy toward the Jewish com-
munity in Paris with a certain “panache” and that they were “distinctive” in both
their style and their “generosity.”28 However, the creation of the Fondation Roth-
schild represented a significant departure from earlier faith- or community-based
initiatives, although it was similar to the one launched in 1872 to provide aid
for working-class rents.29 As Céline Leglaive-Perani has argued, Jewish philan-
26
Dumont, Le logement social à Paris; Klaus Weber, “One Hundred Years of the
‘Bluff Rothschildien’: Housing the Poor in Paris,” Rothschild Archive: Annual Review,
April 2003–March 2004, 12–17.
27
Klaus Weber, “La philanthropie des Rothschild et la communauté juive de Paris au
XIXe siècle,” Archives Juives 44, no. 1 (2011): 17–36. The family also signed a family
pact in connection with these philanthropic initiatives. “Pacte de Famille,” Rothschild
Archive, London, Lafite Papers OC 161.
28
Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community
at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971), 67.
29
Rothschild Archive, London, Lafite Papers OC 161 contains the family’s Novem-
ber 12, 1872, letter regarding the gift established in the name of the deceased James de
588 Ford
thropy in France had moved beyond the specific needs and concerns of the Jew-
ish community by the early twentieth century, and this may have been “a strategy
of social integration,” a manifestation of a broader patriotic sentiment, and per-
haps an effort to combat antisemitism.30 Klaus Weber has stressed that none of
the private correspondence in the Rothschild Archive in London reveals how
the family considered their initiative in relation to the Dreyfus Affair, but when-
ever a Rothschild or other members of the French Jewish community planned a
charitable project that went beyond the limits of that community, it would have
been noticed.31 Alphonse de Rothschild, in presenting the work of the Rothschild
Foundation, emphasized the gratitude that he felt toward the city of Paris: “In the
memory of our father, who founded our business and also in recognition of the
welcome that we have always received from the population of Paris where we
have spent all our lives, we wished to create a charity in the public interest and
we decided to commit a sum of ten million francs for the construction of afford-
able housing.”32 In contrast to the Rothschild housing initiative in Spitalfields in
the East End of London, which was undertaken with the explicit aim of housing
immigrant Jewish families from Russia and eastern Europe in 1887, the Roth-
schild housing initiative in Paris was intended to aid the city’s working poor, irre-
spective of religion or political orientation, and it specifically addressed the prob-
lem of insalubrious housing.
One of the first tasks of the foundation was to find a plot on which to build.
The city of Paris and the Department of Public Assistance identified three blocks
that belonged to the municipality in working-class districts of the city—the rue
de Prague in the 12th arrondissement, the rue du Marché-Popincourt in the 11th ar-
rondissement, and the rue de Belleville in the 19th arrondissement—and the foun-
dation eventually bought them for a total of 1,155,000 francs.33 Before establish-
ing the architectural competition, which asked for designs for the triangular lot in
the rue de Prague, the foundation sent a small delegation to study social housing
projects by the Peabody Foundation and the Four Percent Industrial Dwellings
Company, which had been created by the English branch of the Rothschild family
Rothschild and the rules to be followed for distributing these funds in 1907. OC 220
contains annual letters to the mayors of the city’s arrondissements in the 1890s.
30
Céline Leglaive-Perani, “De la charité à la philanthropie: Introduction,” Archives
Juives 44, no. 1 (2011): 10.
31
Klaus Weber, “Far-Sighted Charity: Adolphe and Julie de Rothschild and Their
Eye Clinics in Paris and Geneva,” Rothschild Archive: Review of the Year, April 2004–
March 2005, 45.
32
Quoted in Leglaive-Perani, “De la charité à la philanthropie”; and see Archives Is-
raelites, no. 28 (July 15, 1909): 217.
33
The Commission spéciale des habitations à bon marché du conseil municipal set
out the conditions for the sale of the three plots. La Construction Moderne, 2nd ser., 10
(December 17, 1904): 144.
and by the London County Council in England. While the housing constructed
by the Peabody Foundation was very austere, dwellings built by the council
were more innovative, and the Rothschild Foundation may have been especially
interested in its use of picturesque facades and green spaces. The Rothschild
Foundation’s decision to depart from then current architectural practice in France
may also have been influenced by the council model. It created an architectural
agency inside the foundation itself, which would be composed of salaried archi-
tects working for it, instead of hiring architects who would be paid for a single
project. The advantage of the agency was that it could also serve as a kind of “ar-
chitectural school” where new materials and approaches could be experimented
with in solving the specific problems posed by social housing. This innovation
met with considerable protest among the architects in the Société des architectes
diplomés par le gouvernement (SADG), who argued that such an approach under-
mined both the architect’s autonomy as an artist and architecture itself as a liberal
profession. It laid the groundwork for the creation of a kind of “architectural col-
lective” that was taken up in the construction of social housing after the First
World War.
The Rothschild Foundation’s board of directors decided on an open and pub-
lic architectural competition and made it clear that the winning projects would
become the property of the foundation. It reserved the right to use them for future
building ventures, which also marked a departure from established practice.34
The financial awards were, moreover, considerable, and the competition itself
was to be held in two rounds in order to allow younger architects with limited
means to participate and to encourage those who were advanced to the second
round to improve on their designs.
Advisers to the Rothschild Foundation, who included Jules Siegfried, Emile
Cheysson, and Georges Picot—prominent proponents of HBMs in France and
active members of the reformist Section d’hygiène urbaine et rurale at the Musée
Social—as well as the renowned architect Paul-Henri Nénot, drew up a set of
specifications for the competition, which, when published, was only two pages
long.35 The specifications were left deliberately vague in order to give the con-
testants a freer hand in their designs.
The aims of many of the social reformers associated with the Rothschild
Foundation were largely, although not exclusively, articulated in paternalistic
terms. Their views of the working class were not dissimilar to those of earlier
social commentators, like Louis René Villermé, who decried its moral state,
which many commentators linked to the social and political unrest that had char-
acterized France since the French Revolution, leading some of them to conflate
34
Dumont, Le logement social à Paris, 34.
35
On the Musée Social, see Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern
France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham, NC, 2002).
590 Ford
the “laboring classes” with the “dangerous classes.”36 Marcel Lecoq, however,
admonished “all those who have the luck of relaxing in an aerated, light, and
spacious apartment when they go home” to have a social conscience and “think
of working-class families who can find neither space, nor fresh air, nor sun-
light.”37
The Rothschild Foundation’s architectural program reflected the desire to
combat what it saw as the disintegration of the working-class family as a result
of the scourges of alcoholism, promiscuity, and disease, most notably tuberculo-
sis. Others saw such initiatives as a means to stave off working-class discontent,
thus dampening the appeal of socialism. In the minds of many middle-class com-
mentators and social reformers, a clean, well-lit home would also undercut the
appeal of the bar or cabaret, and a building with facilities such as water closets
and independent rooms would discourage promiscuity.38 While the building of
salubrious housing was part of a larger project among socialists for improving
working-class health by combating disease, even in their circles concerns about
the morals of the working class were not entirely absent. Henri Sellier, the social-
ist mayor of Suresnes and pioneer of the garden city movement in France during
the interwar period, is a case in point.39 The socialist deputy Albert Thomas
was, however, less paternalistic in his call for the construction of comfortable,
hygienic housing in a series of articles that he wrote for L’humanité and Cahiers
du socialiste in 1908–9, where he argued that “the revolutionary proletariat will
not be formed within infected dwellings and cities lacking in air.” Indeed, he im-
plored all socialists to pay greater attention to the problem of working-class hous-
ing, and he insisted that the question of creating a salubrious environment should
not be left to “an association of intellectuals, artists, philanthropists, some associ-
ation for the protection of landscapes, some league against alcoholism and some
gentlemen from the Musée Social.”40
36
Chevalier, Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes.
37
Marcel Lecoq, La crise du logement populaire (Paris, 1912), 1. Georges Franche
previously identified a current of opinion that insisted on some demonstration of moral
rectitude among the working class before they should be provided a new level of comfort.
Franche, Habitations à bon marché: Éléments de construction moderne (Paris, 1905), 1.
38
By the early twentieth century this paternalistic impulse, which reflected deep-
seated negative prejudices about working-class families, also took a eugenic turn, which
was in plain view in the Ungehabe cité-jardin in Strasbourg in the 1920s. See Gina Ma-
rie Greene, “Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for
Children during the Third Republic in France (1870–1940)” (PhD diss., Princeton Uni-
versity, 2012); and Paul-André Rosental, Les destins du eugénisme (Paris, 2016).
39
He cited the need to combat alcoholism and tuberculosis. Greene, “Children in
Glass Houses,” 261.
40
Quoted in Caroline Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in
Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 178–79.
In spite of some of the more paternalistic motivations, the Rothschild Foun-

dation specified that the architects should take the tastes, aspirations, and needs
of the neighborhood’s population into account, an injunction that was largely
absent from English and German projects and therefore at once new and bold.
The foundation and the municipality did not want the new building to be con-
sidered “class housing, caste housing.”41 The successful project was to steer
clear of any evocation of the cité ouvrière, the barracks, or the hospital. This
requirement was an obvious reaction against earlier social housing projects
in Paris and most notably against the Cité Napoleon.42 In order to avoid the con-
struction of narrow corridors, many wanted each apartment in the rue de Prague
to have its own lighted landing and staircase. Moreover, the foundation was com-
mitted to the idea that the buildings should provide essential services, which
would include heating, baths and showers, laundry, garbage disposal, running wa-
ter, a “restaurant hygiénique,” and a toilet inside each apartment, as well as a day
nursery for young and school-age children, a school to teach domestic arts, and
even a mortuary. These services and amenities were unprecedented, represent-
ing a radical departure from many earlier models of working-class housing in
which the idea of comfort and convenience was completely absent. Finally,
the architectural candidates were required to provide estimates of the cost of
construction and to indicate expected rates of return on investment.
On March 31, 1905, 127 projects were submitted to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris,
where they were put on public display. This was an unprecedented number com-
pared to both previous and subsequent public architectural competitions preced-
ing the First World War.43 The exhibit attracted a large number of journalists and
architects as well as the public at large before it closed and the foundation’s jury
completed its deliberations. The jury consisted of six architects and six non-
architects. It included the president of the Société centrale des architectes fran-
çais and another architect chosen by the society, the president of the SADG and
another architect chosen by the SADG, and two architects elected by the candi-
dates themselves. In many respects these architects represented the architectural
establishment. Henri Paul Nénot (1852–1934), who was already the Rothschild
Foundation’s chief architectural consultant, was president of the Société centrale
des architectes français, one of the oldest professional organizations in France.
He received his training at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, as did the other five archi-
tects, Georges Roussi (1847–1934), Louis Bonnier (1856–1946), Victor Laloux
41
“Des maisons de classe, des maisons de caste.” H. Turot, “Rapport au nom de la
Commission des HBM,” Conseil Municipal: Rapports et documents, no. 8 (1905): 133.
42
See Catherine Granger, L’empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris,
2005), 87–88.
43
There were forty-eight submissions in first public competition for the building of
low-cost housing in 1890 and fifty in the 1913 competition.
592 Ford
(1850–1937), Jean-Louis Pascal (1837–1920), and Paul Wallon (1845–1918).

All but Bonnier and Wallon had won the Prix de Rome awarded by the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, one of France’s most prestigious architectural prizes, which al-
lowed the winner of the grand prize to spend three years at the Villa Médicis in
Rome and which helped to launch quite a few very successful architectural ca-
reers. However, in 1905 none of the architects on the jury had any firsthand ex-
perience either in building working-class housing or in judging a competition for
the construction of working-class housing. Nénot, for example, was best known
as the architect of the Sorbonne in Paris, and Laloux had designed two train sta-
tions, including the Gare d’Orsay; two hôtel de villes; and the American embassy
in Paris (in collaboration with the American architect William Delano). Jean-
Louis Pascal became the architect in chief of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France on the death of Henri Labrouste in 1875, while Georges Roussi had
played an active role in the universal expositions of 1889 and 1900 in Paris. Al-
though some of the jury architects had designed residential buildings, those resi-
dences were destined for an elite—as in the case of Nénot, who was the architect
of the Hôtel Blumenthal-Montmorency, a hôtel particulier (mansion townhouse)
on the avenue Foch in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris.
In the first round, the jury selected twenty-five projects from the 127 submit-
ted, and in the second round they selected seven projects in rank order, each of
which was awarded a monetary prize. The first prize in the final round, which
the jury awarded unanimously, went to Adolphe Augustin Rey, who received
10,000 francs, an extraordinary sum for the period, for his submission “Pour
le Peuple.” Henry Provensal and Wilfrid Bertin received the second and third
prizes for their projects “Utile Dulci” and “Tout sur Rue” and sums of 9,000
and 7,000 francs, respectively. The fourth prize went to André Ventre and Léon
Besnard, who shared 6,000 francs for “Sursum,” and the fifth prize, 4,000 francs
each, was awarded to Gustave Majou, Gaston Le Roy, and an Austrian Wilhelm
Eichmüller, for “M. dans Une Etoile,” “Riri,” and “Tête de Coq,” respectively.
The other eighteen projects selected in the first round were not left uncompen-
sated: each received 2,000 francs. The foundation had initially envisioned a bud-
get of 50,000 francs for the awards, but it increased the amount to 80,000 francs
in recognition of the high quality of the submissions, far exceeding the monetary
awards in other public competitions during this period.
The Challenge of an Architecture for the People

Most of the prizewinners—Augustin Rey (1864–1934), Henry Provensal (1868–
1934), André Ventre (1874–1954), Léon Besnard (1879–1954), Gustave Majou
(1862–1941), and Wilhelm Eichmüller (1868–1915)—were relatively young.
The youngest among them, Léon Besnard and André Ventre, who co-submitted
the project “Sursum,” were still architectural students, aged twenty-five and thirty-
one, respectively. Gaston Le Roy (1858–1928) was slightly older than the others.
With the exception of Wilfrid Bertin, all of the prizewinning architects were
trained at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts.44 Its rival institution, the Ecole
Centrale d’Architecture, which was founded by Emile Trélat in 1865 to modern-
ize architectural education and to challenge the Ecole des Beaux Arts’ virtual mo-
nopoly, was not well represented among them, even though its more practical and
scientifically based curriculum was perhaps better suited to the design of working-
class housing.45 While four of the six architects on the jury had won the Prix
de Rome, none of the second-round prizewinners had done so. The young Tony
Garnier (1869–1948), who was a Prix de Rome prizewinner and who would go
on to become one of the France’s most innovative modernist architects in the
interwar period, submitted a project anonymously under the name “louve ro-
maine,” or “Roman she-wolf,” perhaps in reference to the myth of Rome’s found-
ing and the city where he had spent the previous three years.46 His submission,
organized along two zigzag lines crossing at the center of the triangular site, pro-
duced six courtyards that opened onto the street. It was widely admired for its
audacity and originality, and it was selected in the first round of the competition,
but Garnier failed to advance to the second round. Ironically, other successful
contestants in the second round incorporated open courtyards and other elements
of Garnier’s design into their submissions.47
Prix de Rome prizewinners and more established architects, who were not
among the competition’s prizewinners, may have shied away from the compe-
tition because it involved working-class housing and would have lacked pres-
44
Just as the documentation pertaining to the Rothschild Foundation’s 1905 compe-
tition was not conserved, the private papers of the prizewinners cannot be found among
those at Centre des Archives du XIXeme Siècle of the Institut Français d’Architecture,
which is now part of the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris. Some docu-
mentation on the architects who trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts can be found in
the subseries AJ/52 pertaining to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in
the Archives Nationales at Peyrefitte. This, in turn, has been inventoried for the online
Dictionnaire des élèves architectes de l’École des beaux-arts (1800–1968), ed. Marie-
Laure Crosnier-Leconte, by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
45
Indeed, one of the studies that its students undertook in 1902 was the “comfort and
hygiene of low cost housing.” Frédéric Seitz, L’école spéciale d’architecture, 1865–
1930 (Paris, 1995), 88.
46
C. Krzysztof Pawlowski, Tony Garner: Pionnier de l’urbanisme du XXe siècle
(Lyon, 1993), 82.
47
Garnier would ultimately make his career in his native city, Lyon, where he be-
came the city’s chief architect under the socialist mayor Edouard Henriot, designing
the city’s quartier des Etats-Unis, which was built between 1919 and 1933. Tony Garnier
authored Une cité industrielle: L’étude pour la construction des villes (Lyon, 1919) and
had a formative influence on the young Le Corbusier. See Louis Piessat, Tony Garnier,
1869–1948 (Lyon, 1988).
594 Ford
tige in France’s architectural culture at the time, in spite of the project’s celebrity
and the prize money involved. This might also explain why Tony Garnier sub-
mitted anonymously. In Berlin, in contrast, the design of housing was no longer
considered to be “below the dignity of the profession,” and by the 1890s an older
generation of architects with national reputations were taking a leading role in the
design of social housing for the working class.48
The architects on the jury appeared to favor those who had trained at the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, as they had, but they were not solely responsible for selecting the
prizewinning designs, as social reformers associated with the Musée Social and
members of the Rothschild Foundation participated in the final decisions. While
the designs were evaluated carefully for their architectural merits, the cost of the
project also played a vital role in determining whether a submission was success-
ful, in contrast to the architectural competitions that were regularly held at the
Ecole des Beaux Arts, where most of the successful candidates had trained.
The program in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts was highly regarded
internationally and attracted students from around the world, but in many ways it
did not train its students to design the kind of building that the Rothschild Foun-
dation’s architectural competition demanded—the habitation à bon marché.
The school could trace its origins to the founding of the Académie royale d’ar-
chitecture in the seventeenth century, and it had been reorganized several times.
It experienced student protests in the nineteenth century and was an object of
criticism, even though it had the reputation of being one of the world’s finest ar-
chitectural schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.49 Controversy and
debate regarding its curriculum and pedagogical direction was ignited by Eu-
gène Viollet-le-Duc soon after Napoleon III came to power in 1851, for exam-
ple, leading to pedagogical reform in 1862–63. In his 1862 petition to the em-
peror calling for the reform, Viollet-le-Duc stated that the school “had ceased
to be in harmony with the march of ideas and the needs of the present.”50 While
reforms were implemented as a result of the petition and Viollet-le-Duc was
named a professor of the history of art and aesthetics, resistance to the reforms
and to Viollet-le-Duc remained fierce, and he resigned his post in 1864, inspiring
Emile Trélat a year later to create the Ecole Centrale d’Architecture, which in-
troduced a more scientific curriculum and more practical forms of architectural
training.51
48
Bullock and Read, Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 123.
49
Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History, 80.
50
Quoted in Annie Jacques and Anthony Vidler, “Chronology: The Ecole des Beaux
Arts, 1671–1900,” Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 8
(Spring 1977): 156.
51
On the founding of the Ecole Centrale d’Architecture, see Seitz, L’école spéciale
d’architecture.
Architectural students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries received their education in the form of courses on history
and theory as well as through more practical training in the ateliers of individual
architects.52 One of the core courses in the curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux
Arts at the turn of the century on the elements and theory of architecture, which
was taught by the eminent architect Julien Guadet from 1894 onward, surveyed
“the composition of buildings, as to their elements and as to their whole, from
the double point of view of art and of adaptation to definite programs, or in other
words, actual needs.”53 The first part of the course surveyed the elements of ar-
chitecture, including walls, vaults, ceilings, and rooms, while the second part
examined the principal kinds of buildings that architects would be called on
to design, ranging from military, religious, and civil buildings to private habi-
tations. Guadet was silent when it came to working-class housing, however,
and only considered “luxury” dwellings destined for the middle and upper clas-
ses in his lectures on domestic architecture. Moreover, the themes of architec-
tural competitions at the Ecole des Beaux Arts itself rarely included housing.
The most common subjects for the competitions between 1819 and 1914 were
schools and commemorative monuments.54 The growing interest in domestic
architecture was reflected in Charles Garnier’s 1892 book on the subject, which
asserted that “it is only in our day that concern is shown for balancing elegance
with comfort in the apartments of the middle class,” but it was mute on the sub-
ject of working-class dwellings.55 Yet there were exceptions. Léonce Reynaud
and Emile Trélat, who founded the Ecole Centrale d’Architecture, for example,
addressed the question of working-class housing, but it is significant that neither
of these two architects trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Reynaud trained to be
52
See Jacques Lucan, Composition, non composition: Architecture et théories, XIXe–
XXe siècles (Lausanne, 2009); Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des
Beaux Arts (New York, 1977); and Guy Lambert, “La pédagogie de l’atelier dans l’enseig-
nement de l’architecture en France au XIXe et XXe siècles, une approche culturelle et
matérielle,” Perspective (2014): 129–36.
53
Julien Guadet, Eléments et théorie de l’architecture was first published in Paris in
1902. It was translated into English ca. 1907 by John Galen Howard, who was himself
an American student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts from 1891 to 1893 and founder of the
architectural program at the University of California, Berkeley. His typescript “The El-
ements and Theory of Architecture: A Course Given at the Ecole Nationale and Spé-
ciale des Beaux Arts, Paris France” was never published and was originally housed in
Berkeley’s Architectural Department Library. It is now available from Hathitrust.org.
Guadet, “The Elements and Theory of Architecture,” trans. John Galen Howard (Berkeley,
1907), 4.
54
Eleb and Debarre, Architectures de la vie privée, 123.
55
Garnier and Ammann, L’habitation humaine, 824. See Sharon Marcus, Apartment
Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, 1999), 158–
65; and Léonce Reynaud, Traité d’architecture (Paris, 1863).
596 Ford
an architect and engineer at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, where he would
later occupy a chair in architecture. Charles Garnier did finally acknowledge the
problem of working-class housing by suggesting that “the current epoch has the
immense honor of working seriously to improve the housing of the poor,” and
he observed that salubrious low-cost housing had become “a fashionable ques-
tion.”56 Similarly, periodicals devoted to art and architecture began to turn their
attention to low-cost housing. Just after the creation of the Rothschild Foun-
dation, Edmond Uhry emphasized the importance of the new philanthropic soci-
eties dedicated to their creation and observed that “among the social problems
that currently attract public attention the most, hygienic affordable housing is
one that has made the most progress and whose practical solution is beginning
to bear fruit.”57
While he was initially silent on the subject, by the time of his death in 1908
Guadet had acknowledged that the current “epoch is, in the matter of housing
above all, the epoch of comfort and of hygiene: one can say that this will be-
come the characteristic of our architecture.”58 The first edition of his four-
volume Eléments et théorie de l’architecture, published between 1901 and
1904, did not, however, give the same attention to hygiene as did the subse-
quent revised editions. When Guadet did address the issue, he stressed that
comfort and hygiene were primarily to be found in buildings designed for those
with financial means, and he held out little hope that a majority of a city’s in-
habitants could ever find them in their dwellings.59 He posited that half of the
population lived in cities and that their “hygienic conditions” could not be im-
proved substantially: “The agglomerations of buildings, their height, narrow
streets, closed courtyards, all of this is anti-hygienic, all of this is inevitable”—
so the indignation of hygienists was, in his view, “a little puerile.”60 In short,
he did not appear to see that one could be wholly successful in constructing hy-
gienic housing in Paris for the working class because they were necessarily con-
fined to small spaces because of the high cost of land. “What can we do about
that? . . . The problem escapes us; it also escapes the hygienists.”61 He despaired
of a real solution while nonetheless stating the obvious in instructing his stu-
dents to “think seriously about the well-being of those who must live in what
you construct.”62 In the end, Guadet believed that it was “a big error to think
that architecture could or should invent everything, prescribe everything”; he
56
Garnier and Ammann, L’habitation humaine, 824.
57
Edmond Uhry, “Logements hygiéniques à bon marché et maisons de rapport,”
L’art décoratif: Revue mensuelle d’art contemporaine, July–December 1904, 128.
58
Julien Guadet, Eléments et théorie de l’architecture, 4th ed. (Paris, 1910), 2:155.
59
Guadet, Eléments et théorie de l’architecture, 2:155.
60
61
62
thought that the sanitary engineer should solve the problems of hygiene and
that the architect was first and foremost an independent artist, whose first task
was one of composition.63 This is perhaps not a surprising view, as Guadet was
the author of France’s first professional architectural code, the Code Guadet,
which made a clear distinction among the roles played by entrepreneurs, engi-
neers, and architects in the construction of buildings.64
The Rothschild competition’s winning entries came, then, from students or
former students of the Ecole des Beaux Arts who had virtually no training in
the construction of low-cost housing because it had little or no place in the
Beaux Arts curriculum. The prizewinners also broke with Guadet’s understand-
ing of the architect’s role, even though one of them, Henry Provensal, had been
a student in his studio. This raises two questions: why did they break with pre-
vailing views regarding the role of the architect and embrace a new kind of ar-
chitectural design, and how were they able to make this break?
Years before the competition, some of the prizewinners had already come un-
der the influence of Frantz Jourdain, perhaps one of the most vituperative critics
of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and its training, and had become part of his avant-
garde circle, which included, among others, the sculptor Alexandre Charpentier,
the writer Emile Zola, and the painters Auguste Renoir and Henri Toulouse-
Lautrec. Frantz Jourdain, who had matriculated in 1867 and would go on to refer
to the education students received there as a “veritable moral syphilis,” pub-
lished a withering condemnation of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1893 in the form
of a novel entitled L’atelier Chantorel: Moeurs d’artistes, which was loosely
based on his own experiences there.65 Its protagonist, who fails in the profession
because he refuses to conform to existing norms, submits a design for a private
residence to the Salon. It is both practical and comfortable, while being adapted
to the needs of modern life, and he uses scientific discoveries and modern indus-
trial materials. However, it is rejected in favor of designs harking back to the
style of Louis XIV.66
Jourdain played an important role in the lives of some of the young architects
associated with the Rothschild competition and offered both moral support and
63
64
The Code Guadet was adopted by members of the Société Centrale des Architectes de
France, an association founded in 1840 to defend the professional interests of architects in
France, at their annual congress in Bordeaux in 1895. The question of whether the architect
should also play the role of the engineer and entrepreneur remained a subject of debate,
however. Louis Cornille, La réglementation de la profession d’architecte (Paris, 1937), 13.
65
Frantz Jourdain, De choses et d’autres (Paris, 1902), 43.
66
The students are described as sheep in the novel: “With this mechanical regularity
of herds, each puts his foot in the footprint of the elder . . . without wishing to break the
chain and seeking to climb to the crest of the path to discover new horizons.” Frantz
Jourdain, L’atelier Chantorel: Moeurs d’artistes (Paris, 1893), 103.
598 Ford
patronage, which gave them the confidence to question the Ecole des Beaux
Arts’ training and practices. Jourdain had personally arranged an exhibition of
the work of several young architects from the Ecole des Beaux Arts at a Parisian
commercial gallery, Le Barc de Boutteville, in 1896. The “rebel architects” who
participated included François Garas, Gabriel Guillemonat, Ernest Hersher,
Charles Imbert, Henry Provensal, and Henri Sauvage.67 Sauvage was twenty-
three at the time, Hersher was twenty-six, and Provensal was twenty-seven.
Jourdain took many a young architect under his wing, hoping that the young
would “turn their eyes away from the past” and march “valiantly forward” by
“throwing decrepit and worm-eaten traditions in the sewer.”68
The Rothschild Foundation’s competition and the work of other philanthropic
building societies provided young architects with new opportunities. It resem-
bled none of the competitions that the Ecole des Beaux Arts sponsored and gave
them the freedom to consider a different kind of architectural design: domestic
architecture for the working classes. However, three other developments con-
verged by 1902 to encourage architects and architectural students to think dif-
ferently about architectural design and to consider the question of hygiene
and the urban environment more explicitly. The first was the passage of the public
hygiene law on February 15, 1902; the second was a revision of building regula-
tions for the city of Paris by decree on August 13, 1902; and the third was the sur-
prising introduction of some informal teaching on the relationship between hy-
giene, disease, and architecture in the Ecole des Beaux Arts on December 6, 1902.
A new law governing public hygiene, which was intended to address insalubri-
ous housing and an unclean water supply, among other persistent urban problems,
was finally passed by the French parliament, after sixteen years of debate, on Feb-
ruary 15, 1902. It was followed by the creation of a new set of the building reg-
ulations six months later. The building regulations for the city of Paris, which
67
The preface to the exposition catalog was written by Frantz Jourdain. Impressions
d’architectes (F. Garas, G. Guillemonat, E. Hersher, Imbert, H. Provensal, H. Sauvage):
Première exposition chez Le Barc de Boutteville, 47 rue Le Peletier, ouverture mercredi
le 25 novembre 1896 (Paris, 1896). Barc de Boutteville was an avant-garde gallery that
regularly exhibited the work of impressionist and symbolist painters. For a discussion of
Garas, Guillemonat, and Provensal and the impact of the symbolist movement on their
designs, see Marie-Astrid Pourchet, Les architectes idéistes (du XIXe siècle-début du
XXe siècle) (Saarebruck, 2011).
68
Frantz Jourdain, Constructions élevés au Champ de Mars par M. Charles Garnier
pour servir à l’histoire de l’habitation humaine (Paris, 1889), 20. Jourdain acknowledged
that many considered his comments on the Beaux Arts training incendiary: “Yes, certainly,
I have violently criticized the illogical, narrow, dangerous, anti-French education through
which youth at the Ecole des Beaux Arts atrophies.” Jourdain, Propos d’un isolé en faveur
de son temps, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1914), 8. For Frantz Jourdain, see Meredith L. Clausen, Frantz
Jourdain and the Samaritaine (Leiden, 1987); and Arlette Barré-Despond, Frantz Jour-
dain, 1847–1935; Francis, 1876–1958; Frantz-Philippe, 1906– (Paris, 1988).
had set minimum frontage heights for buildings and related maximum building
heights to street width since 1784, were revised a number of times during the
nineteenth century. However, many architects chafed under the regulations of
the Second Empire, which encouraged, in their view, a uniformity and lack of in-
novation for which the architecture of Haussmann was criticized. Hygiene also
increasingly became a matter of concern, and this concern in part shaped the re-
vision of the building regulations in 1882 and 1884.69
Louis Bonnier, an architect employed by the city of Paris and a rapporteur of
the proposed regulations who was also appointed to the Rothschild jury three
years later, put architectural aesthetics on the same footing as hygiene: “In the
end, the aesthetic of architecture is not a luxury for a people, but a need and a
right on the same plane as hygiene.”70 The 1880s and 1890s marked a turning
point in this regard. By 1897 many called for yet another revision of regulations
that reflected the “deplorable habits” of architects and engineers who were “en-
emies of fresh air, sunlight, and even cleanliness.”71 The SADG, which had been
founded in 1877, formulated the principles of the new 1902 decree, and the
subcommission named to draw up the new regulations consisted of some of
France’s most prominent architects, including Charles Garnier, Emile Trélat,
and Jean-Louis Pascal, in whose atelier some of the Rothschild Foundation prize-
winners had been students while at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Pascal became a
member of the Rothschild competition jury, as did Louis Bonnier, who would
become architect in chief for the city of Paris, charged with overseeing hygiene
and housing.72 Bonnier was invited to give two lectures sponsored by the SADG
in the amphitheater of the Ecole des Beaux Arts to explain the nature of the new
decree and the forty-five new articles that replaced the seventy-eight that pre-
ceded them. He argued that they would give architects greater liberty in terms
of the design of facades, allowing for new kinds of windows, particularly bow
windows and skylights, which would bring in more light, as well as cupolas that
had not been allowed by the prior regulations.73 In his second lecture, Bonnier ex-
plicitly defined the subcommission’s intentions in terms of establishing a more bal-
anced relationship between the “needs of construction and the general interest,”
69
For a discussion of the importance of hygiene in the modernization of the city of
Paris and for the emergence of urbanism as a discipline in this period, see Fabienne
Chevallier, Le Paris moderne: Histoire des politiques d’hygiène (1855–1898) (Rennes,
2010).
70
Quoted in Chevallier, Paris moderne, 65. On Bonnier, see Bernard Marrey, Louis
Bonnier, 1846–1946 (Brussels, 1988).
71
Louis Bonnier, Conférences faites dans l’hémicycle de l’Ecole Nationale des Beaux-
Arts les 22 et 29 octobre 1902: Les réglements de voirie (Paris, 1903), 3.
72
Marrey, Louis Bonnier, 60. On the SADG, see Marie-Jeanne Dumont, La S.A.D.G.:
Histoire d’une société d’architectes, premère partie, 1877–1939 (Paris, 1989).
73
Bonnier, Conférences faites dans l’hémicycle, 13.
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on the one hand, and “a better interpretation of the laws of hygiene,” on the other.74
In defending the new regulations, he cited the city’s central districts, filled with
dark buildings on narrow streets, as belonging to the “good old days, times when
the liberty to build badly flourished.”75 For the subcommission the new rules were
only the codification of “tomorrow’s customs, if not those of today.”76
Architects had increasingly called for a more varied domestic architecture that
would allow for a greater freedom in architectural design. This was summed up
by L. C. Boileau, who designed the department store Au Bon Marché: “Creative
artists and all men of taste were complaining about the lack of variety among the
houses built on the new streets, and their lack of decorative significance. Some
of our distinguished city councilors, while undertaking inquiries abroad, had
been struck by certain picturesque features of houses in Brussels, London, Vi-
enna, and in a few German towns. Back in Paris, they had urged that Parisian
builders should be allowed the same freedoms as those enjoyed by foreign build-
ers.”77
There was some disagreement among the architects who participated in the
revision of the regulations. Emile Trélat did not think that the proposed revisions
went far enough. He was an ardent defender of hygiene when thinking about ar-
chitectural design. Hygiene became central to discussions in the Société de
médecine publique after a communication from Trélat in 1897 regarding archi-
tectural projections permitted by the building code.78 He argued in effect that de-
mands by architects to permit even more pronounced projections in the name of
greater freedom in architectural expression was in direct conflict with the prin-
ciple of hygiene. For example, the projections that architects wished to design to
cover the upper parts of balconies would, in his view, darken a building’s interior
and went directly against a principle of aesthetic simplicity that, he believed, was
an integral part of integrating hygienic considerations into architectural design.
Louis Bonnier explicitly addressed these concerns, having undoubtedly heard
them in discussions surrounding the revision of the 1884 building code, in his
introduction to the technical subcommission in 1897, by acknowledging that
some considered the projections an affront to the “precious domain of hy-
74
75
76
77
Quoted in Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History, 121.
78
Emile Trélat, “Les saillies autorisées sur les façades des maisons au point de vue de
la salubrité,” Revue d’hygiène et de police sanitaire (Paris, 1897), 673–76. Trélat wrote
extensively on the subject of hygiene and participated in a number of international con-
gresses. See Emile Trélat, Exposition d’hygiène urbaine: Salubrité des édifices (Paris,
1886), Contribution de l’architecture à la salubrité des maisons et des villes: Conférences
de l’exposition universelle internationale de 1889 (Paris, 1890), and La salubrité (Paris,
1901).
giene.”79 Julien Guadet weighed in from the sidelines by warning his students to
be careful of “exaggerations” when it came to concerns about hygiene in archi-
tecture: “You will meet hygienists who would wish that our facades have no pro-
jections because these projections collect dust. A completely nude façade
[made] of enameled material rather than stone, that is their dream. Inside, the
suppression of all molding . . . applying to our homes what one puts in an oper-
ation theater in a hospital.”80 The hygienic objectives behind the revision of the
municipal code were echoed several months later by a lecture entitled “The
Fight against Tuberculosis: Its Relationship to the Art of the Architect, Engineer,
and Technical Industry,” given in the same amphitheater at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts, once again under the patronage of the SADG, on December 6, 1902, by
Dr. Camille Savoie, a corresponding member of the Bureau central de la lutte
contre la tuberculose and formerly a member of the Paris medical faculty.
The relationship between insalubrious housing and disease had long been the
subject of concern among municipal authorities. During the Second Republic
the Commission des logements insalubres was established; it was aided by the
Conseil d’hygiène publique et de salubrité du département de la Seine, and nu-
merous measures were undertaken to rid the city of insalubrious housing, which
was seen as a leading cause of a number of epidemics.81 When typhoid ravaged
the city of Paris in 1882 the Academy of Medicine in Paris devoted seven meet-
ings to examining the relationship between typhoid and housing. The typhoid
epidemic was followed two years later, in 1884, by a cholera epidemic.82 How-
ever, even after measures were successfully implemented to stop the spread of
typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and diphtheria, tuberculosis remained a pressing
problem, and how the disease was transmitted was initially very poorly under-
stood. Studies undertaken by Paul Juillerat, head of the Bureau de l’assainis-
sement et du casier sanitaire des maisons de Paris, to document the incidence
of disease over a ten-year period in France revealed that while the percentage
of those dying from tuberculosis was 1.8 in Paris, in certain urban blocks it
was as high as 8.5 percent, and in certain tenement bedsits, 20 percent, suggest-
ing that there was a strong correlation between the disease and housing. After the
discovery by the German doctor Robert Koch of the bacteria responsible for
causing the disease, further studies showed that it was very sensitive to light
and could be destroyed by exposure to the sun, while flourishing in the dark
or in the shade. Juillerat’s studies appeared to confirm that one was more likely
79
Quoted in Marrey, Louis Bonnier, 57.
80
Guadet, Eléments et théorie de l’architecture, 2:172–73.
81
Chevallier, Le Paris moderne, 123– 62.
82
Chevallier, Le Paris moderne, 145– 49. Elisabeth Viollet-le-Duc, the mother of
one of France’s most prominent architects, who was herself the daughter of an architect,
died in Paris during a cholera epidemic some years before.
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to find cases of tuberculosis in higher buildings and that those cases would be
concentrated on the lower floors. He also found a correlation between cases
of tuberculosis and the number of windows in a building as well as its density
in terms of population.83 He stressed the orientation of windows and a building’s
exposure, arguing that an east-west exposure was preferred.
While some of Juillerat’s findings were disputed, they began to have an im-
pact on young architects and even medical students in university faculties and
at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Dr. Joseph Casati, for example, defended a thesis
in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Bordeaux on hygiene in the art of
construction, which he dedicated to the architect Jean-Louis Pascal, a member of
the Rothschild competition’s jury.84 He was joined by a number of doctors and
architects who published a series of tracts on housing and hygiene from the late
nineteenth century onward.85 Louis Bonnier teamed up with Juillerat to present a
report that appeared to go against some of the basic principles taught by Julien
Guadet on the role of the architect: “The time is past when the architect only has
to concern himself with the artistic aspects of his edifice and whether the space
on which he builds is more or less remunerative.”86 The architect, in their view,
could not simply be an “artist”; he had to become a man of his times as well, a
hygienist and an engineer, or he had to work very closely with engineers and hy-
gienists.87
Many of the prizewinners had clearly embraced the hygienic cause, and some
had already begun to rebel against the academic traditions and elitism of the
Ecole des Beaux Arts. As a result of the roles that Louis Bonnier and Jean-Louis
Pascal played on the commission to revise the city’s building regulations and
their views on the relationship between architecture and public hygiene, the
young architects could count on a sympathetic ear from them, as well as from
Henri-Paul Nénot, who had defended the Rothschild Foundation’s competition,
which was criticized by some architects for challenging how the architect should
practice his profession. It was somewhat ironic that Pascal should favor the new
architecture, however, as he, along with Guadet, had fiercely resisted Viollet-
83
For a summary of his findings, see Paul Juillerat, L’hygiène du logement (Paris,
1909).
84
Joseph Casati, L’hygiène et l’art dans la construction (Paris, 1903).
85
See Jean Laumonier, L’hygiène de l’habitation (Paris, n.d.); and M. Bousquet, Hy-
giène de l’habitation: Sol et emplacement, matériaux de construction (Paris, 1911). Bous-
quet had been a student of hygiene in the medical faculty and was an architect for the city
of Mantes in the western suburbs of Paris.
86
Paul Juillerat and Louis Bonnier, La tuberculose et l’habitation (Paris, 1905), 6.
They pointed out that between 1894 and 1904, 101,496 deaths in Paris could be attributed
to tuberculosis (6).
87
Monique Eleb has commented on the debate over the new role to be played by
architects in this period, a debate that continued into the interwar period. Eleb and
Debarre, Architectures de la vie privée.
le-Duc’s reforms at the Ecole des Beaux Arts while he was a student. Bonnier, Pas-
cal, and Nénot did not, moreover, participate in organizations that promoted a
social art “for the people,” as Frantz Jourdain did—a goal that the title of Au-
gustin Rey’s winning entry echoed.
A New Generation of Architects

Most of the Rothschild competition’s prizewinners belonged to a new generation.
Henry Provensal, who won second prize, had already played the role of the ren-
egade. As a twenty-seven-year-old student he had participated in the 1896 exhi-
bition of young “rebel architects,” and he had published a book on the “art of
tomorrow” a year before the 1905 Rothschild Foundation competition in which
he declared that architecture, first among the plastic arts, had been “mute for a cen-
tury.”88 The book, which would have a major impact on a much younger Swiss
architect, Pierre Jeanneret, who would later assume the name Le Corbusier,89
expressed the view that architecture would soon “awake from its torpor” and that
new architectural forms would emerge as a result of new needs.90 L’art de
demain was complemented by a series of articles that Provensal published in
a journal entitled La vie normale: Revue d’études psychologiques, founded
by the doctor Paul Valentin in 1903.91 A former student of Julien Guadet, Pro-
vensal called into question the role of the state and by implication that of the
Ecole in shaping artistic taste and norms in his first article for the journal, which
was published in January 1905.92 This was followed by articles on the Roth-
schild Foundation’s competition and the “aesthetics of the street,” “architecture
for the people” or the common man, and the “French school” of architecture
more generally.
88
Henry Provensal, L’art de demain: Vers l’harmonie intégrale (Paris, 1904), 1. For a
recent discussion of Provensal’s work, see Estelle Thibault, La géometrie des emotions:
Les esthétiques scientifiques de l’architecture en France, 1860–1950 (Wavre, 2010),
and “Le temple et la cité harmonique, ou l’utopie d’un art synthétique au prisme de
l’économie sociale,” in McWilliam, Méneux, and Ramos, L’art social en France, 281–96.
89
Paul Turner, “The Beginnings of Le Corbusier’s Education, 1902–1907,” Art Bul-
letin 53, no. 2 (June 1971): 214–24.
90
Provensal, L’art de demain, 295.
91
His mission was to “spread essential ideas of practical psychology and preventive
hygiene in a language accessible to all.” Paul Valentin, “Chronique: Coup d’oeil rétro-
spectif,” La vie normale, no. 1 (January 1907): 1. Paul Valentin was previously the editor
of Revue de psychologie clinique et thérapeutique (1897–1901) and author of Les reli-
gions orientales considérées dans leurs rapport avec l’hygiène et la prophylaxie des mal-
adies contagieuses (Paris, 1894).
92
Henry Provensal, “Sur la séparation des Beaux-Arts et de l’Etat,” La vie normal,
no. 1 (January 1905): 11–13.
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Provensal represented a new generation of architects who came of age at the

turn of the century and who were dedicated to l’art social, which Provensal ar-
ticulated in the following terms: “For the moment, the intellectual movement
withdraws from the church and is working to restore a humanitarian religion,
which has not yet assumed its social form, but which calls however on architec-
ture to assume new tasks.”93 The construction of the habitation à bon marché
was in many ways ideally suited to their purpose, but this raises the question
of where this new social purpose originated. For Provensal, in a century of
machinisme, architecture should have the objective of social amelioration and
should provide the working man or woman with comfort and beauty. “Air, light,
flowers, simple and harmonious furniture”—in sum, a healthy environment—
would create a “strong, happy race capable of conceiving of life other than as
a terrible punishment.”94 He described the Rothschild Foundation initiative as
embodying these ideas. In his view, the foundation was destined to advance
the cause of affordable and salubrious working-class housing, which would
ultimately lead to the “regeneration of collective housing” more generally and
at the same time to a “complete transformation in the world of applied architec-
ture,” starting in popular collective housing before moving on to bourgeois
housing and finally to luxury housing, by “combining clean, rational, beautiful,
and pleasing interiors,” which would be matched in the design of external fa-
cades.95 To view working-class housing as being at the forefront of architectural
innovation that would make its way into housing for elites was unprecedented; it
was a reflection of a larger movement dedicated to improving the urban environ-
ment from the bottom up.
In 1902 a group of architects, artists, and journalists founded the Société de
Nouveau Paris with the aim of improving certain districts of the city by introduc-
ing green spaces and new housing for the common man, particularly at the perim-
eter of the city if the city’s fortifications were razed. Architects associated with the
Société de Nouveau Paris included the ubiquitous Frantz Jourdain (who became
its president), Henry Provensal, Henri Sauvage, Eugène Henard, and Hector Gui-
mard, and they sponsored an annual architectural competition on the theme of
flowered balconies and gardens.96 Writing in the journal L’Architecture on June 6,
1903, Frantz Jourdain used the artist Honoré Daumier’s aphorism “il faut être de
son temps” to describe Le Nouveau Paris’s mission. Founded in part in reaction to
93
Provensal, L’art de demain, 295.
94
Henry Provensal, “L’esthétique de nos rues: III, L’architecture du peuple,” La vie
normale, no. 8 (April 1905): 7–8.
95
Provensal, “L’esthétique de nos rues: III,” 8.
96
Catherine Méneux, “Frantz Jourdain, La Société Le Nouveau Paris, 1903,” in
L’art social de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre: Anthologie de textes sources, ed. Neil
McWilliam, Catherine Méneux, and Julie Ramos (2014), https://inha.revues.org/6107.
the Société du Vieux Paris, which was dedicated to the preservation of the cap-
ital’s historic monuments and sites, Le Nouveau Paris had another mission, ar-
guing that new needs necessitated new artistic forms: “Understanding that if the
past merits respect . . . we think that it is disastrous to remain hypnotized by a
sterile contemplation of vanished centuries and we have the intention of involv-
ing ourselves actively in modern life, [a] life as interesting, as curious, as fasci-
nating, as fertile, as beautiful as that of our ancestors.”97 Le Nouveau Paris also
railed against real estate speculators who were constructing new housing prin-
cipally for the bourgeoisie without the aid of architects, and Provensal decried
their “often deplorable taste,” their “stupid conservative spirit,” and their “out-
dated bourgeois ideas.”98 In contrast, Provensal called for an art and architecture
for the people in the name of “social amelioration.”99
Architects embraced new architectural forms and materials and the concept
of what Roger Marx, a writer and the general inspector of departmental muse-
ums in France, came to call l’art social. As the social question came to be the
subject of intense debate in the 1890s, with the publication of the papal encyc-
lical Rerum Novarum and the rise of socialism more generally, Marx and others
stressed the importance of collective forms of cooperation. Marx in particular
turned his attention to the social function of art. He first used the term l’art so-
cial in 1898, and by 1909 he spoke in terms of an art that was intimately in-
volved in the life of the individual and society, calling for an international ex-
position to foster l’art social and to regenerate architecture and the decorative
arts more generally.100 In addition to Le Nouveau Paris, a number of similar as-
sociations that celebrated art’s social mission were formed, including L’Art
pour tous and the Société internationale de l’art populaire et d’hygiène, founded
by Jean Lahor.
Several architects also cofounded their own private building societies to con-
struct affordable and hygienic housing for the working class. Frantz Jourdain,
97
Quoted in Méneux, “Frantz Jourdain.”
98
Henry Provensal, “L’esthétique de nos rues: Le ‘Nouveau Paris,’ ” La vie normale,
no. 6 (March 20, 1905): 8.
99
A degree of condescension can, however, be detected in his assessment of what the
working classes might actually want in terms of domestic comfort, suggesting that they
might look for it in a “bourgeois conception of comfort and beauty,” and for this reason
he thought that one should be careful about asking for working-class views directly. For
him, it was up to the artists and the thinkers, “knowing the physical and moral needs of
peoples,” to create an “atmosphere of joy, cheerfulness, and beauty” for the worker
threatened by alcoholism and tuberculosis. Provensal, “L’esthétique de nos rues: III,”
7–8.
100
Méneux, “Roger Marx et l’institutionalisation de l’art social,” 324; and Roger
Marx, “De l’art social et de la necessité d’en assurer le progrès par une exposition,” Idées
modernes, no. 1 (January 1909): 46–57.
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who was at the forefront of so many new artistic initiatives during this period,
including the highly influential Salon d’Automne,101 cofounded the Société
anonyme des logements hygiéniques à bon marche with Horace Weill, a chief
engineer for the Pont et Chaussées, in 1903. It counted Amédée Dherbécourt, a
socialist municipal councilman of the 18th arrondissement, as one of its admin-
istrators, as well as prominent figures in finance, politics, and the world of let-
ters, including Salomon Reinach, Paul Gallimard, Edmond de Rothschild, and
Henri de Rothschild. The architect Henri Sauvage, Jourdain’s young protégé,
and his partner Charles Sarazin were chosen to be the Société’s exclusive archi-
tects. It was at this moment that Sauvage, who had left the Ecole des Beaux Arts
without a diploma to start his own architectural firm with Sarazin, would aban-
don his dalliance with art nouveau and embark on a new path, just as Henry
Provensal would abandon his own dalliance with symbolism. This new departure
coincided with Sauvage’s work for the Société anonyme des logements hygién-
iques à bon marché, which would provide inspiration for many of the submis-
sions to the Rothschild Foundation’s architectural competition in 1905.102 It is
probably because Sauvage and Sarazin became the sole architects for the Société
and hence were engaged in other projects that they did not submit an entry for
the Rothschild Foundation competition. However, Sauvage was closely linked
with Henry Provensal and went on to design perhaps one of the most innovative
examples of public housing after the First World War in the rue des Amiraux in
Paris’s 18th arrondissement.103
The HBM that brought the work of Sauvage and Sarazin to the attention of the
architectural world was built in Montmartre for the Société anonyme des loge-
101
The Salon d’Automne was founded in 1903 by Jourdain to encourage young art-
ists; it set itself apart from the state-sponsored salon held in the spring by displaying the
work of photographers, designers, painters, and sculptors.
102
The statutes for the society were approved by ministerial decree on July 18, 1903,
and published in the same year. Société anonyme des logements hygiéniques à bon marché
(Paris, 1903). A brochure detailing the society’s accomplishments was published on its
ten-year anniversary. Dix ans de lutte contre le taudis: L’oeuvre de la société anonyme
des logements hygiéniques à bon marché, immeubles construits (Paris, 1913). Cité de
l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Institut Français d’Architecture, Centre d’archives d’Ar-
chitecture du XXe Siècle, Henri Sauvage papers, SAUHE-A-1, 018 ifa B6.26.
103
Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarazin published Eléments d’architecture moderne
in two volumes in 1903– 4; its promotional blurb described the two authors as “special-
ists of modern art.” The blurb also made clear that the elements that they presented in the
form of chimneys, loggias, and porches were not excessively whimsical (“sans fantaisie
outrancière”). Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarazin, Eléments d’architecture moderne,
2 vols. (Paris, 1903– 4). For Henri Sauvage and his design of HBMs, see Jean-Baptiste
Minnaert, Henri Sauvage ou l’exercice de renouvellement (Paris, 2002), 91–115; and
Taylor, “Henri Sauvage and Hygienic Housing.”
ments hygiéniques à bon marché at 7 rue Trétaigne.104 The site, which was rela-
tively small, was to provide twenty-nine rental units and nine individual stu-
dios. Reflecting the socialist leanings of some of the founders of the society,
the services provided were unique for social housing projects and included a
grocery store in the form of a cooperative; a restaurant, La Prolétarienne; a roof-
top terrace-solarium to combat tuberculosis; baths; and a université populaire
with a meeting room and a library. These were features that Augustin Rey would
adopt in his prizewinning submission to the Rothschild Foundation in 1905.
The structure itself was constructed using new building materials in the form of
reinforced concrete, and each of the apartments had three rooms and a separate
kitchen, built-in cupboards, a water closet, and basement storage space. The floor-
ing was made of washable material, and ventilation and exposure to sunlight were
prime concerns in the design of the building. The size of the apartments marked a
clear break with the standard working-class dwelling in Paris, as most of the latter
had no more than two rooms. At the building’s inauguration in July 1904, Frantz
Jourdain was reported in L’humanité to have summed up the project in the follow-
ing way: “We consider that the words charity, pity no longer belong to our times
and that one must simply give the people what they are due. We have thus not en-
gaged in a philanthropic work, but in a work of human solidarity.”105
In many respects Sauvage’s and Sarazin’s rue Trétaigne HBM defied Julien
Guadet’s declaration that construction of comfortable and hygienic housing for
the working class was impossible. Hygienic considerations were at the very core
of the building’s design, just as they were central to the Rothschild Foundation’s
architectural competition. The Société anonyme des logements à bon marché and
the Rothschild Foundation provided the prizewinning architects with whom
Sauvage had been a student in the Ecole des Beaux Arts with a new kind of col-
lective laboratory for architectural research and experimentation.106 Not unlike
Impressionist painters who had broken with the academic system many years be-
fore in displaying their work in a salon des refusés, architects in France began to
embark on a similar journey. Private foundations and building societies estab-
lished to construct low-cost housing provided architects the opportunity to do
so.107
104
The project received special recognition by the Congrès international d’assainis-
sement et de salubrité de l’habitation in 1904. Sauvage and Sarazin would go on to build
four other HBMs in some of Paris’s peripheral districts: 20 rue de Severo in 1906 (14th),
1 rue de Chine in 1908 (20th), 165 boulevard de l’Hôpital in 1909 (13th), and 1 rue Ferdi-
nand Flocon in 1914 (18th).
105
Quoted in Minnaert, Henri Sauvage, 98.
106
“L’immeuble à loyers économiques constitue alors un véritable terrain de re-
cherches.” Eleb and Debarre, L’invention de l’habitation moderne, 315.
107
Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional
Changes in the French Painting World (London, 1965).
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The Winning Projects

La Construction Moderne congratulated the Rothschild Foundation prize-
winners for submitting new kinds of architectural plans that differed from those
normally submitted in competitions sponsored by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, or
even to the city of Paris, and for their evident sobriety, in contrast to those who
embraced “art for art’s” sake.108 The projects that were selected in the second
round of the competition also exhibited several characteristics that reflected a
deep concern with the issue of hygiene. Almost all of them adopted some ver-
sion of an open courtyard, which was relatively new in the design of domestic
architecture. All of them addressed the problem of ventilation and the circula-
tion of air, and each of them envisioned green spaces and proposed different
solutions for the elaborate system of services that would be provided for the
building’s inhabitants. Each was concerned with the construction of windows
that would provide an adequate exposure to sunlight throughout the day. Most
of them used new, cheaper building materials, most notably reinforced con-
crete, and Provensal adopted the bow window, which was made possible by
the new 1902 building code and which was so well received in Henri Sauvage’s
rue Tretaigne design. The Austrian-born architect Eichmüller, who had been a
student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, went so far as to accentuate green space by
creating a loggia, which he called an “entrée en plein air,” between the elevator
and the entrance to apartments, where residents could grow their own plants.109
It was, however, Adolphe Augustin Rey’s project that won over the Roth-
schild Foundation’s jury, which was composed of a diverse mix of philan-
thropists, architects, and hygienists. Rey paid particular attention to ventilation
and the circulation of air. He compared cities to bodies “furrowed by canals of
air,” and his design, which featured open-air courtyards and perforated facades,
was intended to cleanse apartments on the triangular lot and improve air quality
within the city itself.110 He specifically attempted to capture certain kinds of
wind while impeding others, such as those from the west, which often brought
rain. The lot’s buildings were constructed around three open-air squares (fig. 1).
Air circulation was central to the design of stairways, which were open and
108
La Construction Moderne, 2nd ser., 10 (April 8, 1905): 131.
109
Dumont has observed that the loggia prefigured on a small scale the design of Le
Corbusier’s villa apartment building that was built fifteen years later. Dumont, Le logement
social à Paris, 52–53.
110
Quoted in Enrique Ramirez, “Triangular Blocks and Wind Tunnels: Augustin Rey’s
Logic of Air Resistance,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 2 (May 2014): 272. Ramirez ar-
gues that Rey provided an aerodynamic solution to modern block design and examines the
impact of a burgeoning aeronautic culture on architecture during the early Third Republic
in France. Enrique Ramirez, “Airs of Modernity, 1881–1914” (PhD diss., Princeton Uni-
versity, 2013).
Fig. 1.—“Concours de la Fondation Rothschild: Maisons à usage de petits logements
salubres et économiques, à Paris; Projet de M. Augustin Rey (Première prime),” L’Archi-
tecture: Journal hebdomadaire de la Société Centrale des Architectes Français, no. 36
(September 9, 1905), plate 41. Color version available as an online enhancement.
610 Ford
conceived as vertical extensions of the street, having only two apartment en-
trances per landing. Some of the apartments were unusually large and had as
many as five rooms; at the same time, one-room studios were provided on the
top floors for the unmarried. Each apartment featured a separate kitchen, a linen
closet, a garbage chute, a pantry, and built-in cupboards, providing a level of
comfort and convenience that was unparalleled. The common-area facilities
were extensive and included baths and showers, a laundry, heating, and individ-
ual storage cellars. In addition to providing space for shops at the ground level,
Rey’s plan also made provision for storage areas for bicycles, a “hygienic” res-
taurant, a small library, a writing and assembly room, a rooftop terrace, a mor-
tuary room, and a nursery (fig. 2). Finally, Rey responded to the foundation’s
specifications in virtually every way, and his design’s picturesque facade was
a source of admiration (fig. 3).
Henry Provensal won second prize for his project “Utile Dulci,” a title that
refers to verses 343–44 of Horace’s Ars Poetica regarding how a poet wins “ev-
ery vote” from readers by blending what is useful with what is agreeable. Pro-
vensal thus implied that the goal of his architectural design was to do the same
(fig. 4).111 He did not fully respond to all of the foundation’s specifications, but
his plan displayed a harmonious symmetry that was appreciated by the jury’s
architects, and he was particularly concerned that each apartment should be ex-
posed to sunlight and that the building’s terraces should be accessible to all apart-
ment dwellers. However, the large central courtyard, which was intended to be a
green space, was one on which kitchen and privy windows faced, raising funda-
mental issues about the building’s overall design. Wilfrid Bertin’s plan, which
won third prize, adopted a zigzag design as well as open courtyards. André Ventre
and Léon Besnard, who won fourth prize, also envisioned a large open courtyard
along with three smaller courtyards, which were, however, sharply criticized for
being enclosed.
When the Rothschild Foundation’s first apartment block was being con-
structed, it was said to embody some of the most advanced ideas about the orga-
nization of domestic space for the purpose of improving the health and environ-
ment of the urban worker. It was also a radical improvement on the Four Percent
Dwellings Spitalsfields project, sponsored by the British branch of the Rothschild
family, in London. Far from being “bleak, barren, smoke-blacked,” and “sadisti-
cally ugly,” as Jerry White has perhaps ungenerously described the latter, the Roth-
schild Foundation’s Paris apartments were architecturally far more innovative in
terms of the organization of domestic space.112 They came to be greatly admired
111
Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London,
1926), 478–79.
112
See Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block,
1887–1920 (London, 2003), ix.
Fig. 2.—“Garderie,” SIAF/Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine/Archives de l’Archi-

tecture du XXe siècle. 190 IFA, Fonds de l’Office public d’habitations à loyer modéré de
la Ville de Paris. C. Documentation, planches imprimées. Color version available as an on-
line enhancement.
by architects and critics alike and were described as airy, sun filled, and spacious.
Indeed, La Construction Moderne described the results of the competition as
“brilliant.”113 All of the projects embraced hygiene as a guiding principle, and
modern comforts were an inherent part of the designs. In many respects the com-
petition provided a training ground for the architects who submitted their designs,
and it had a lasting impact on them by serving as a point of reference in thinking
about new projects. Many of the architects who participated in the competition
came to be employed on a full-time basis by the philanthropic societies that
had been founded to construct low-cost housing for the working class and subse-
quently for the French state. This liberated young architects from relying on the
larger public projects, such as schools, train stations, and public monuments,
for which they had received training at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, as well as on
a domestic architecture destined for the well-to-do. Ironically, however, Augustin
Rey was perhaps a victim of his own success. Although he was initially employed
as an architect by the Rothschild Foundation after his project was awarded first
prize, he stepped down a few years later as cost overruns led the Foundation to
113
“Le concours Rothschild,” La Construction Moderne, 2nd ser., 10 (September 9,
1905): 595.
Fig. 3.—“Concours de la Fondation Rothschild: Maisons à usage de petits logements
salubres et économiques, à Paris; Perspective d’une façade, Projet de M. Augustin Rey
(Première prime),” L’Architecture: Journal hebdomadaire de la Société Centrale des
Architectes Français, no. 36 (September 9, 1905), plate 42. Color version available
as an online enhancement.
Fig. 4.—“M. Henry Provensal, Fondation Rothschild, Concours des Habitations à

bon marché,” in Armand Guérinet, L’Architecture aux Salons, 1906: Société des Artistes
Français/Société Nationale des Beaux Arts (Paris, 1906), plate 159.
alter his original design. He then became a familiar face on the international con-
ference circuit, participating in over thirty international conferences in the space of
six years, because of the attention that his Rothschild project attracted. Indeed, his
conference schedule became so crowded that he ultimately abandoned the prac-
tice of architecture and authored various theoretical tracts on the housing crisis,
public hygiene, the importance of ventilation and sunlight in domestic architec-
ture, and even contemporary international politics.114 In so doing he came to artic-
ulate a new role for the architect, whom he described as a hygieniste par excel-
lence, arguing that “the rational construction of housing in temperate climates is
too often given over to arbitrariness.”115
114
Augustin Rey, La chambre habitée et les poussières, l’héliothermie et l’habitation
climatique (Paris, 1921), La crise de l’habitation, le congrès interallié de Londres, juin
1920: Ses enseignements (Paris, 1921), and Hygiène et médecine publique, le grand
ennemi de la tuberculose, l’orientation solaire de l’habitation (Paris, 1923); Augustin
Rey and C.-H. Regnard, Le brevet d’hygiéniste-technicien (Rennes, 1924). Rey also began
to write about international relations during and following the First World War.
115
Augustin Rey, “Congrès international de la tuberculose,” La Construction Mo-
derne, 2nd ser., 10, no. 53 (1908): 625–26.
614 Ford
Henry Provensal would have a more practical impact on the subsequent con-
struction of social housing in France. He became a spokesman for the social hous-
ing movement, which is somewhat ironic given the abstract and theoretical thrust
of his L’art de demain and his early flirtation with symbolism, as evidenced in his
House of Solness the Master Builder, a painting he exhibited in the architectural
section at the 1903 Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts exhibition.116 It drew its in-
spiration from Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play The Master Builder, in which the mas-
ter builder Solness conceives of a “home for the people” to which he constantly
refers in the play in terms of “a castle in the air with a firm foundation.”117 Pro-
vensal joined the Rothschild Foundation’s architectural agency as a full-time
employee soon after he won second prize and became the foundation’s chief ar-
chitect at age forty, after Rey’s resignation. Thereafter, he spent his life as an ar-
chitect of low-cost housing, first for the Rothschild Foundation and then, from
1919 until his death in 1934, for the city of Paris’s Office public d’habitations à
bon marché.118
In 1908, Provensal published L’habitation salubre et à bon marché, in which
he defined a new architecture for the people: “We will counter dank and dark
slums, where so many families rot at the present moment, for the most part up-
rooted from more welcoming environs, with luminous, clean, cheerful dwell-
ings, each with substantial ventilation. Flowers, greenery, trees planted in squares
left free of construction will assure reserves of oxygen, at the same time that they
dispense alms and the illusion of [having] a little of this good Nature, from
which numerous tenants have been driven, by chance and all kinds of imper-
ative forces and needs.”119 This seemed to be achieved in the rue de Prague
building (fig. 5). He went on to describe the elements that were inherent parts
of the kind of architecture that would create such an environment. Just as he
had drawn on physiological theories in his 1904 L’art de demain, Provensal ex-
plored the impact of architectural space on the human organism in his 1908
work, drawing on physiological ideas of the period, and called for nothing less
than a broad refashioning of urban space. While he was enough of a realist to see
that older districts of Paris would never be razed, he argued that it was urgent to
construct different kinds of thoroughfares in the city’s newer districts, particu-
larly at the periphery of the Paris, where the city’s fortifications were to be de-
molished. He argued that the architect must in a sense act as an urban planner and
116
For a discussion of Provensal’s aesthetic ideas in L’art de demain, see Thibault,
La géometrie des emotions, 97–114.
117
Quoted in Mark B. Sandberg, Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the
Modern Uncanny (Cambridge, 2015), 186.
118
Archives Nationales AJ/52/397 and Crosnier-Leconte, Dictionnaire des élèves
architectes de l’École des beaux-arts (1800–1968).
119
Henry Provensal, L’habitation salubre et à bon marché (Paris, 1908), 2–3.
Fig. 5.—“The Louvre of Social Housing,” 8 rue de Prague. (Photo, author.) Color ver-
sion available as an online enhancement.
respond to new exigencies.120 Provensal called for reconsidering the height of

buildings as well as the orientation of streets and their width to maximize exposure
to sunlight. However, it was the incorporation of green spaces into architectural
design that reflected a new sensitivity to health, hygiene, and the environment:
“Green spaces to be found between buildings will be reservoirs of adequate air,”
serving as openings onto streets and constituting “veritable extensions of the public
thoroughfare.”121 Trees and green spaces would thus create “laboratories of oxy-
gen” to counter the many sources of carbon dioxide in the city.122 Returning to
the theme of an art and architecture for the people, Provensal reaffirmed their
“right to sunlight and to [clean] air, which should not be [considered] a luxury,
but a necessity.”123
L’art de demain and L’habitation salubre are frequently viewed as works
that are at odds with one another. The first is seen as an avant-garde theoretical
work and a call to arms, while the second is viewed as a practical and prescrip-
tive guide to the building of low-cost housing for the working class. However,
120
Provensal, L’habitation salubre, 21.
121
122
123
616 Ford
both works are bound by common aesthetic assumptions; indeed, some of the
language of the La vie normale essays is echoed in L’art de demain as well as in
L’habitation salubre (where it sometimes appears verbatim). Both works reflect
Provensal’s central concern with the role of the architect and of architecture
more generally. For Provensal, the architect reflected the social aspirations of
his time, and the architect himself was called on to be a “vector of their trans-
formation.”124
Conclusion
France and Paris began to address the problem of working-class housing later
than other European countries and capitals. Social reformers and architects were
all too aware of this fact. The rate at which different cities addressed a working-
class housing crisis was shaped by the availability of residential land as well as
capital, land prices, and building regulations. For Anthony Sutcliffe, France’s
late response can be explained in terms of slower rates of industrialization,
slower population growth, and the French urbanization process, which differed
from that of other cities in Europe.125 Paris nonetheless jumped into the fray and
was largely successful in constructing a new kind of domestic housing for the
working class, albeit on a more modest scale than in England or Germany. Paris,
however, made up for what in lacked in scale with architectural innovation and
audacity. Moreover, what made Paris unique was the role played by a younger
generation of less established architects, who explicitly argued that architecture
should have a social mission to improve the lives of an urban population through
architectural designs that were sensitive to health, hygiene, and the natural en-
vironment. In Berlin, by contrast, older, established architects such as Alfred
Messel (1853–1909) and Theodor Goecke (1850–1919) embarked on the design
of working-class housing that was also sponsored, as in France, by philanthropic
foundations. Their designs, however, were in many respects less novel than
those in Paris, and the closed courtyard remained the norm, even if Goecke be-
gan to design larger ones. The Mietskaserne with up to twenty dwellings on a
single floor on either side of an unlit common corridor remained ubiquitous.
By the start of the First World War, new housing initiatives in Berlin, while con-
siderable, still did not fully address the problem of low-income housing, but they
did play a part in housing the better-paid artisan or clerk.126
Architects of social housing before World War I in Vienna were also more
established and from an older generation. However, one of the most forward-
looking projects, sponsored by Jubilee Charitable Trust in 1896 in anticipation
124
Thibault, La géometrie des emotions, 107.
125
Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, 136.
126
Bullock and Read, Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 137.
of the emperor’s jubilee in 1898, was won by the architects Theodor Bach (1858–
1938) and Leopold Simony (1859–1938), who specialized in social housing after
the First World War in Red Vienna. Their designs for the “Jubilee Houses,”
which served as a model for Red Vienna’s post–World War I social housing, de-
parted from architectural conventions through the elimination of the common
corridor that was typical of the Mietskaserne, creating more staircases and pro-
viding access to air and sunlight. However, as in Germany, most low-income
workers could not afford the rent, and the majority of tenants were white-collar
workers or better-paid skilled workers.
One might surmise that, in fulfilling a social mission through their domestic
architectural designs, this new generation of French architects created new ex-
pectations, which came to be shared by the working and middle classes alike,
for what domestic architecture should look like and what it should provide.127
While there is little to no trace of how the working-class residents experienced
these new levels of comfort before the Second World War, the Canadian urban-
ist Michel Lincourt conducted a survey among the residents of the Rothschild’s
“Louvre of social housing” in 1994 to assess their level of satisfaction and to
“identify the reasons for their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.”128 Many of the
residents had lived in the building for over thirty years. Some had lived in
the building between fifty-one and eighty-five years, with one resident claiming
occupancy since 1909. An overwhelming majority expressed a high degree of
satisfaction with the living conditions in the building.
Long before the Second World War, then, architects began to address the issue
of comfort and the provision of services in social housing. Moreover, whereas in
the past architectural innovation in domestic architecture first appeared in the lux-
ury housing market and then was transferred in some form into working-class
dwellings, just before and after the war this trend was reversed.129 The modernist
architect Rob Mallet Stevens, who designed exclusively for French elites, ob-
served in 1911 that all social groups enjoyed a new level of domestic comfort,
and he saw the “role of modern architecture” to be one of “organizing a practical,
hygienic, and convenient design in which air and light reign supreme.”130
127
Surveys regarding housing preferences among the French were not conducted un-
til after World War II. See, e.g., Institut National d’Études Démographiques, Désirs des
français en matière d’habitation urbaine: Une enquête par sondage, travaux et docu-
ments, bk. 3 (Paris, 1947).
128
Michel Lincourt, In Search of Elegance: Towards an Architecture of Satisfaction
(Montreal, 1999), 201.
129
Eleb and Debarre, Architectures de la vie privée, 506.
130
Originally published as Rob Mallet Stevens, “L’art contemporain,” Le home, no. 5
(May 31, 1911), the article has been reprinted in Rob Mallet-Stevens, 1907–1914, ed.
Maurice Culot (Brussels, 2016), 169.
618 Ford
The ideas and designs of Provensal and many of the young architects associ-
ated with the philanthropic societies founded to construct affordable housing
had a lasting impact. This became apparent when the public authorities took
the lead for the first time on the eve of the First World War. The municipal coun-
cil voted to set aside 200 million francs for public housing, and in 1913 it called
for an architectural competition, which followed the Rothschild Foundation
model to the letter. It was open for a five-month period, and a jury was estab-
lished to judge the submissions using a procedure that was almost identical to
that employed by the rue de Prague 1905 jury.131 After the jury reached its de-
cision regarding the winning submissions, which received monetary prizes re-
sembling those awarded in the Rothschild Competition of 1905, it published
a report. Its author, Auguste Labussière, who was an architect for another phil-
anthropic foundation and who came to specialize in social housing, observed
that all of the winning submissions incorporated several common features: the
open courtyard; the separation of buildings from one another, which had the ad-
vantage of breaking with a traditional uniform monotony of facades facing the
street; and attention to the problem of aeration.132
The experiment with social housing before the First World War also had a sig-
nificant impact on a number of architects after the war. Of the five salaried archi-
tects appointed to the city’s new Office public d’habitations à bon marché, which
was founded in 1914 to construct affordable, low-cost housing, two were Roth-
schild competition prizewinners, and the other three had worked for the Roth-
schild Foundation. When the city of Paris finally ratified the conversion of the
capital’s fortifications to civilian use and large blocks were set aside for the con-
struction of subsidized public housing in the form of HBM and habitations à
loyer modéré, the Société des architectes modernes, founded in 1922 as the
Groupe des architectes modernes by many of the architects associated with the
prewar affordable housing projects, made it clear that they wished to contribute
their expertise to the projects.133
The Groupe des architectes modernes was constituted in anticipation of the
Exposition des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes, which was held in Paris
in 1925. It was dedicated to the principles of modern architecture and to the so-
cial mission of building public housing. Its members included Frantz Jourdain,
who was its first president, Hector Guimard, Henri Sauvage, Donat Alfred Aga-
che, Louis Bonnier, and Henry Provensal. It accepted as new members all those
dedicated to modern architecture, but it did not “impose a [specific] aesthetic on
131
Prefecture du département de la Seine, Ville de Paris, Premier concours pour la
construction d’habitations à bon marché (Paris, 1913), 7.
132
Prefecture du département de la Seine, Premier concours, 7.
133
Jean-Louis Cohen and Andre Lortie, Un système de projets parisiens à l’ére de la
metropole: La ceinture des fortifications au périférique (Paris, 1989), 171.
young architects” or privilege a particular architectural tendency.134 However, ar-

ticle 2 of its statutes asked its adherents “to build according to the principles of a
modern aesthetic, to the exclusion of all pastiche” and to the exclusion of previous
styles.135
This aesthetic embodied the principles of simplicity, rationality, harmony,
and the integration of a built environment into the natural environment. Indeed,
Henri Sauvage, in commenting on the architectural submissions to the Salon
d’Automne in 1922 in an article entitled “Trends in modern architecture,” ob-
served that modern architecture expressed a deep concern for hygiene and health,
the use of new building materials, and the principle that all have the right to the
same level of comfort.136 For him, the guiding principles of a new modern archi-
tecture were “unity, simplicity, and purity,” and he called on the architect to forget
everything that he had “learned so painfully [in order] to return, at all costs, to
wisdom, to clarity, to order, to logic.”137
The Rothschild Foundation’s 1905 architectural competition marked an im-
portant turning point in the way many young architects came to view their role.
They used their architectural designs as a technique of social intervention. In
1910, Albert Louvet described how the role of the architect had changed in L’art
d’architecture et la profession d’architecte. The architect, in his view, could no
longer be viewed as an artist who copied past styles for wealthy patrons. Archi-
tects had to be at the forefront of architectural innovation for all social classes.
The building of social housing in the two decades preceding the First World War
provided conditions in which architects could redefine their roles and reconsider
their mission, shaping the debate about the architect and his or her profession.138
The prizewinners implicitly or explicitly rejected Julien Guadet’s definition of
the architect as principally “an artist and a practitioner” who exercised “a liberal
and non commercial profession”—a definition he enunciated at the 1895 con-
gress of the Société centrale des architectes français and which came to be
known informally as the “Code Guadet.”139 While they had trained at the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, some of the architects rebelled against what they saw as its elit-
134
Declaration of the S.A.M.s governing committee, April 5, 1929, Société des
Architectes Modernes, Annuaire (Paris, 1934), 7, Henri Sauvage papers, SAUHE-C-
1923-3/018 Ifa b6/28.
135
Declaration of the S.A.M.s governing committee, April 5, 1929, Société des
Architectes Modernes, Annuaire (Paris, 1934), 14, Henri Sauvage papers, SAUHE-C-
1923-3/018 Ifa b6/28.
136
Henri Sauvage, “Les tendances de l’architecture moderne,” L’amour de l’art, Oc-
tober 10, 1922, 334.
137
Sauvage, “Les tendances,” 334.
138
Albert Louvet, L’art d’architecture et la profession d’architecte (Paris, 1910).
139
Quoted in Denys Thomé Rodriguez, “L’organisation des architectes sous la
Troisème République,” Le mouvement social, no. 214 (2006): 55.
620 Ford
ism and nonetheless went on in the interwar period to become successful archi-
tects. The creation of an architectural agency of salaried architects by the Roth-
schild Foundation did much to challenge a liberal conception of the architectural
profession, and the model of an “architectural collective” was taken up by the
French state in the construction of social housing after the war, providing the
material conditions for architects to embark on a new path.
In formulating new and innovative architectural designs, Henri Sauvage, Henry
Provensal, Augustin Rey, and eventually the husband-and-wife team Juliette
Tréant-Mathé and Gaston Tréant-Mathé, among others, liberated themselves from
the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but they did not end their days as did the protagonist in
Frantz Jourdain’s L’atelier Chantorel, who was ultimately driven from the profes-
sion.140 Many of the buildings they built in the years immediately preceding and
following the First World War have left lasting marks on the landscape of Paris in
the form of protected heritage sites or as “monuments historiques.”141 In short, the
social housing initiatives in the years before the First World War provided a
launching pad for new conceptions of domestic architecture long before the con-
struction of the arguably much less successful but, ironically, far more studied
grands ensembles in the suburbs of France following the Second World War.
140
Juliette Mathé and her husband, Gaston Tréant, hyphenated their names after they
were married in 1920, a gesture that seems surprisingly feminist for the period. They met
as students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts following World War I and spent most of their
careers as architects co-designing social housing in Paris and its suburbs. They pub-
lished their designs in Gaston Tréant-Mathé and Juliette Tréant-Mathé, Gai logis (Paris,
1930), and Nouvelles habitations à bon marché (Paris, 1930).
141
Sauvage’s and Sarazin’s 1904 apartment house in the rue Trétaigne and Sauvage’s
1926 rue des Amiraux structure were designated as protected sites in 1986 and 1991,
respectively.

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The Paris Housing Crisis and a Social Revolution

in Domestic Architecture on the Eve

more than we have a minimum wage. . . . If the municipal authorities in charge

working class.14 With the notable exception of Jeanne-Marie Dumont, historians

The concerns of architects dovetailed with those of private philanthropic foun-

Paris’s “Louvre of social housing,” a low-cost housing project sponsored by a

The Foundation and the Competition

In spite of some of the more paternalistic motivations, the Rothschild Foun-

(1850–1937), Jean-Louis Pascal (1837–1920), and Paul Wallon (1845–1918).

The Challenge of an Architecture for the People

A New Generation of Architects

Provensal represented a new generation of architects who came of age at the

The Winning Projects

Fig. 2.—“Garderie,” SIAF/Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine/Archives de l’Archi-

Fig. 4.—“M. Henry Provensal, Fondation Rothschild, Concours des Habitations à

respond to new exigencies.120 Provensal called for reconsidering the height of

young architects” or privilege a particular architectural tendency.134 However, ar-

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