High-rise buildings in France

The reader, a contemporary observer of the strong resurgence of the urban tower block, will certainly find critical material of choice in the case studies developed in this new special Bulletin Docomomo France. The genesis, the influence of the models, the singularities, the reception and the future, quite simply the history of theses objects that are scattered around the country like so many village church steeples, concentrating both the hopes and the uncertainties of modernity. The stories of known and lesser-known tower blocks recounted in this Bulletin shed light on the relationships between the contexte, local circumstances, and the material and cultural situations of high-rise buildings. The tower block as both an economic and symbolic instrument of urban development is rapidly becoming the target for a form of critical violence. The weakness of the arguments thus reveals the ideological character of the debates and probably explains, more than the other reasons put forward, the destruction and customization of all kinds, the most common ingredients of which are revegetation and artificial lightninf. Even though the integrity of the residential belfry of the Perret Tower in Amiens could not be preserved, interestinf discoveries are still possible among the precision and tigour of the European Tower in Thionville, the sculptural plasticity of the tower blocks of Grenoble, the sculptural singularity of that of La Duchère or the restrained purism of the Viollet Tower in Angers. (...)