Can America Learn From France’s Award-Winning Public Housing Architects?

The city of Bordeaux might have hoped to see Grand Parc torn down.

Like many of the aging apartment slabs in France’s suburbs, the Grand Parc towers were built in the 1960s to provide mass housing for working-class families and immigrants drawn by factory jobs. These public structures stand as testament to France’s industrial past and relics from the heyday of the Communist Party. Not everyone felt so rosy about them 50 years later.