A Barrage of Houses: World War I and Mass-Produced Housing for France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026.
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A Barrage of Houses challenges canonical narratives about the development of early twentieth-century architecture. Whereas these narratives skip over World War I, downplaying it as a mere hiatus, the book argues that the conflict profoundly impacted the modern architectural discipline by thrusting the concept of mass-produced housing to the forefront of public consciousness.
Leading architectural modernists such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius participated in this story. However, the book contextualizes their relatively minor contributions amidst many forgotten instances of French, American, and German proposals for serial housing to rebuild the devastated regions of France. These notably include proposals by Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage.
All of these mass-produced housing shemes were rooted in military construction technologies and wartime mentalities. Through their arrangements and material systems, these schemes grappled with the armed conflict’s outsize deaths, racial anxieties, geopolitical tensions, breakneck industrialization, and martial totalitarianism. Most were never built. Nevertheless, this flurry of designs and discussions left a lasting mark, instilling the idea of mass-produced housing at the heart of the architectural discipline.