“We were able to rebuild Notre-Dame in five years, it would still be a tragedy if we were unable to rebuild Mayotte”said Emmanuel Macron, on December 19, 2024, while traveling on the island. On December 30, François Bayrou proposed an even shorter deadline: “Maybe two years. » And to achieve this, the Prime Minister mentioned the use of cheap, prefabricated houses, “easy to assemble”.
Read also | In Mayotte, the challenges of reconstruction
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Emergency, reconstruction, prefabrication: in a thesis recently defended at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Belleville, Antoine Perron told the story of this association which became obvious after the disasters of the 20th century.e century (“The machine against the profession. Architects and the criticism of the industrialization of building [France 1940 à 1980] »).
If the idea of prefabrication appeared in the 19the century, the practice remained marginal until the First World War. In 1918, faced with a lack of materials and labor, the hope of rapid reconstruction of the regions devastated by the fighting faded. Prefabrication is essential to house refugees. The emergency works department uses old military barracks, then calls on the company Eternit which sells prefabricated houses made from asbestos-cement sheets.
-An important capital
Prefabrication attracted renewed interest after the Second World War. The housing deficit is then immense. In 1947, France produced one housing per 1,000 inhabitants per year, five times less than the countries of Northern Europe. The Ministry of Reconstruction is launching a series of competitions aimed at accelerating and modernizing construction through prefabrication. Subsidies are granted in exchange for contractors' compliance with standard plans and ceiling prices, sometimes reducing traditional quotes by a third.
Prefabrication is used on a large scale to build entire cities. These competitions most often end in failure. The reason is mainly technical: transporting heavy elements is expensive, their dimensional precision is insufficient, they play more with the effects of expansion, and their jointing is problematic: suffering from numerous defects, these “modern” post-war housing will be unanimously criticized and often demolished.
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