| The extensive practice of regionalist architecture produced in France during the 1920s and 1930s challenges stories that have portrayed modern architecture as the purview of the avant-garde. Following the wrenching upheaval of World War I, France faced the urgent challenge to reconstruct not only a signification portion of its architectural fabric, but also its very identity as a nation. Contemporary publications attest that these two tasks were integrally connected in the public mind. Though long overlooked by scholars, the role of regionalist architecture was not incidental but, rather, fundamental to this enterprise.; As architects sought to respond to the architectural and political challenges of reconstruction, some argued for the return to a pre-war and ostensibly traditional France while others sought a new, more modern nation. By the close of the 1920s these views confronted one another on an increasingly politicized stage: a series of vociferous debates between regionalist and avant-garde architects over whether architecture should be traditional and French, or modern and international. These debates culminated in the Regional Center, a project at the 1937 Paris Exposition that showcased pavilions designed to represent each region of France. They also shaped the course, and discourse, of architecture in interwar France.; This study explores the interaction between the regionalist and avant-garde movements because their exchange draws out issues that have thus far been obscured. While existing scholarship has tended to treat the two movements separately, this work shows that they engaged intensively with one another and, in many respects, defined themselves by one another. Re-examining the modern movement through the lens of regionalist architecture allows for a more full-bodied story of the architecture of interwar France. In addition, regionalist architecture's connection to the broader regionalist movement, which rose to the fore during France's Third Republic (1870--1940), explains why the architecture touched such deep chords in the French psyche. The story of the rivalry between regionalist and avant-garde architecture illustrates how architecture functioned as a powerful metaphor for France's struggle to define itself in the troubled interwar years. |
