At a French Port, Concrete Gains a Residential Allure

This week's European E-NEWS item takes us to France's second busiest port, Le Harve. After World War II, the city was in ruins. Five thousand of the city’s 160,000 pre-war inhabitants lost their lives — many in a series of Allied bombing raids in September 1944 — and 35,000 lost their homes and, with them, practically all their possessions. The new Le Havre was the controversial creation, and master work, of the French architect Auguste Perret and his team. And it was radically different from the brick and half-timber construction with heavily sloping roofs typical of this part of Normandy. For Perret designed and built almost exclusively with concrete, creating flat-roofed apartment buildings with a total of 10,000 units lining broad thoroughfares on the 370-acre site.