Great thread, I've always had a weird fascination for housing projects.
Here are the two most iconic ones from my hometown, Nantes in western France :
Le Sillon de Bretagne, 95 m and 31 floors, located in Saint-Herblain, a western suburb of Nantes. It was said to be the largest public housing building in Europe at the time of its construction (early 1970's) with some 900 flats in one single building. Quickly the building gained a bad reputation, becoming synonymous with social and violence issues. By the 1980's, the white middle-class people who lived in it started to leave and were partially replaced by poor immigrant families from north Africa first, then from subsaharian Africa.
In the late 1980's, the upper floors were converted into offices and the number of flats was reduced from 900 to 750 (soon to be reduced again to 616 with an upcoming renovation).
The second one in Nantes is the famous
Unité d'Habitations by Le Corbusier. Five
Unités were built, the most famous one being the
Unité in Marseilles (the first one to be built). This one, located in Rezé (a southern suburb of Nantes) was the second to be built, from 1952 to 1955. My father spent a part of his childhood in this building :
Now, some housing projects in the city I currently live in, Nanterre (a western suburb of Paris) :
The
Tours Aillaud (aka
Tours Picasso or
Tours Nuage) are among the highest public housing towers of France with 39 floors. Built in the 1970's, they quickly got a pretty bad reputation (lot of drug dealing issues) :
source :
http://www.dmin-dmax.fr/texteAlpa/vues_avec_Alpa.htm
Other spectacular pics on flickr :
Pic by Pasc Lem :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57233603@N00/3387581717/
Pic by Philippe2032 :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/philipp...er/3471140059/
And a pic of my own project, seen from my flat, also in Nanterre, not far from the Tours aillaud :
pic taken this afternoon by a very freezing weather. Actually this project is not really public housing because most of the flats are privately owned and rented.