The Atelier De Montrouge and the New Town of Le Vaudreuil

The Memory of New Towns
By Catherine Blain
English

The experience of the new town of Le Vaudreuil has been lived as a failure: this ambitious project of building a new town of 100 000 inhabitants 100 kilometers away from Paris and 25 from Rouen was to be both a “test operation of modern town planning and architecture” and a “pilot town for the environment”, but it only gave rise to a small commune of 13 500 inhabitants named Val-de-Reuil in 1995. On the basis of the experience of the so-called “Atelier de Montrouge”, a group of architects deeply involved in the new town project for nearly twenty years (1959-1978), we try to correct this interpretation. This micro-history reveals the long gestation of architectural and urban ideas, their theoretical foundations and the privileged modalities of their realization.

Keywords

  • 20th-century architecture
  • new town
  • housing
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