Brutalism in France

France is where the vocabulary of brutalism was first written. Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Marseille (1952) gave the movement its name through béton brut, raw concrete cast against timber boards, and his late works set the template copied worldwide. From the 1950s to the 1970s, postwar reconstruction and the grands ensembles program spread concrete architecture across the country, from housing estates to churches like the Église Notre-Dame de Royan (1958).

The French strand was intellectually ambitious. Claude Parent developed the theory of the oblique with tilted floors and fractured volumes, Jean Renaudie built star-shaped terraced housing at Ivry-sur-Seine, and Jean Balladur planned the seaside resort of La Grande-Motte with its ziggurat apartment blocks. Bernard Zehrfuss co-designed the CNIT hall and UNESCO headquarters in Paris, showing how far French engineering confidence in concrete shells could reach.