“Huts, Houses, and the Industrial Militarization of France.” In States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War, edited by Sophie Hochhäusl and Erin Eckhold Sassin, 176-205. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022.

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During the Great War, Paris hosted an exhibition that forever changed how modern architects thought about residential building materials and construction. The 1916 exhibition of La Cité reconstituée featured full-size mockups of demountable and lightweight houses. Their inventors promoted these building systems as solutions that could speed up reconstruction in the devastated regions of France as soon as the war ended. Yet the strong backlash against this exhibition reveals that, at this somber juncture in French history, advanced housing materials and building methods had become tacitly linked to the autocratic wartime government bent on militarism and engineers’ relentless pursuit of efficiency.








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Etien Santiago




“Hector Guimard’s Visions of Eternal Peace.” In 113th Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2025.  

 

“The U.S. Movement for Mass-Produced Concrete Housing, 1900 to 1924.” Construction History, 2024.                                                                                                        

“Huts, Houses, and the Industrial Militarization of France.” In States of Emergency, 2022.                                                                                                    

“French Mass-Produced Housing in the Crucible of World War I.” On platformspace.net, 2022.                                                                                                

“Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Great War.” JSAH, 2019.


“Bricolage de pointe : Constructions expérimentales dans un contexte étranger pendant la Grande Guerre.” In Construire, 2019.


“The Rough Concrete Surfaces of Perret’s Notre-Dame du Raincy.” In Still Life, 2016.
 
 
“The Super-Urban House.” In The Building, 2016.


“Minimum Structure: Musmeci and the Semiotics of Statics.” In GSD Platform 4, 2011.






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