Image courtesy of Fiona McMurrey
The Grey Ghost Returns
For decades, Brutalism was the architecture everyone loved to hate. Its raw concrete towers and geometric slabs — once symbols of postwar optimism — became shorthand for urban decay, bureaucratic coldness, and failed utopias. In France, the movement was especially maligned: associated with the grands ensembles that ringed Paris, with their broken elevators and fading murals.
And yet, against all odds, Brutalism is back.
Across France, a new generation of architects, photographers, and preservationists is rediscovering the poetry of béton brut — “raw concrete.” Instagram accounts dedicated to 1960s housing estates attract cult followings. Architects reference Le Corbusier and Claude Parent not with irony, but affection. Even the French Ministry of Culture has begun quietly listing Brutalist landmarks as protected heritage sites.
What was once seen as an eyesore has become a mirror — reflecting both nostalgia for a lost future and anxiety about the one we’re building now.
From Utopia to Ugliness
To understand Brutalism’s strange resurrection, you have to understand the trauma of its fall.
After World War II, France was desperate to rebuild. Concrete was cheap, fast, and modern. It embodied the ideals of a new Republic: egalitarian, rational, and forward-looking. Architects like Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, and later Gérard Grandval imagined a society liberated by design — housing for all, light for all, order for all.
But the dream curdled. By the 1980s, the banlieues had become symbols of alienation. Their monumental buildings, once celebrated as social progress, were recast as vertical prisons. Brutalism’s very language — honest, functional, austere — became politically toxic.
The French state demolished many of these complexes, replacing them with pastel suburbanism and glass façades. The future, it seemed, had moved on.
A New Generation Reconsiders
Fast-forward to the 2020s, and something unexpected is happening: young designers and urban thinkers are reclaiming Brutalism.
Why? Because in an age of ecological anxiety, concrete’s honesty feels refreshing. Its imperfections — the texture of wooden formwork, the uneven aging — read as authenticity in a world of glossy façades and greenwashed marketing.
Architectural historian Sébastien Marot calls this “the nostalgia of sincerity.” Brutalism, he says, “wasn’t trying to seduce. It was trying to serve.”
Photographers like Pierre Chabard and Laurent Kronental have elevated these buildings into icons of melancholic beauty, capturing the dignity of their decay. Kronental’s haunting series Souvenir d’un Futur portrays the residents of Paris’s modernist suburbs as caretakers of forgotten utopias — lonely but luminous.
Meanwhile, architecture schools in Nantes, Grenoble, and Bordeaux are revisiting Brutalist principles through a new lens: not as an aesthetic, but as a sustainable ethic. Reuse, repair, and reinterpretation have become the new avant-garde.
Brutalism as Ecological Allegory
At first glance, Brutalism and sustainability seem incompatible. Concrete, after all, is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on Earth. But what’s being revived isn’t just the material — it’s the mindset.
Brutalist buildings were meant to last. They were designed for collective use, not private spectacle. Their exposed structures made maintenance transparent. And many of them, ironically, are proving more adaptable to today’s energy retrofits than their postmodern successors.
In this sense, France’s Brutalist revival reflects a deeper cultural mood: the desire to reconnect with durability, permanence, and truth. When climate change threatens impermanence everywhere, solidness itself feels radical.
“Concrete used to represent the future,” says architect Odile Decq. “Now it represents memory — the idea that what we build should endure.”
Nostalgia, Reversed
There’s irony in France’s newfound affection for Brutalism. For decades, the movement embodied cold rationalism — the suppression of emotion in favor of logic. Now, its return is almost entirely emotional.
This is nostalgia, but not for the past as it was. It’s nostalgia for the belief that design could change the world. For the faith that architecture could be both civic and visionary.
In the filtered light of social media, a housing block in Créteil or Ivry-sur-Seine becomes not just a ruin, but a relic of lost idealism. In rediscovering Brutalism, France is also rediscovering something about itself its postwar optimism, its intellectual rigor, its capacity for collective ambition.
The Future of the Future
Today, the conversation has shifted from demolition to reinterpretation. Projects like La Maison du Fada (Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille) have become tourist destinations and community hubs. The once-derided Les Arènes de Picasso in Noisy-le-Grand is celebrated as architectural heritage.
And across the country, architects are experimenting with béton bas carbone (low-carbon concrete) to blend Brutalist aesthetics with environmental responsibility.
The lesson is not that France wants to live in the past. It’s that it wants to learn from it. Brutalism’s comeback isn’t about concrete at all; it’s about conviction — the courage to build for the collective, not the algorithm.
A Softer Brutalism
The irony of Brutalism’s return is that it no longer feels brutal. In a world of digital ephemerality, its solidity reads as comfort. What once felt cold now feels human — even tender.
Maybe that’s why, on a rainy day in Marseille or Lyon, a concrete façade can suddenly seem beautiful: it’s weathered, imperfect, and enduring. Like memory itself.
And in that endurance, France finds not just nostalgia for the past, but a model for the future — one built, paradoxically, out of the ruins of yesterday’s modernity.