Auguste Perret: Invention in Convention, Convention in Invention

Architectural theories developed at an accelerated rate in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century France as a result of debates regarding theories based on masonry construction techniques and those based on innovations in structural types. French architectural theory was at once preoccupied with the need to explain the new structural types in terms of the existing masonry theories and the need to develop new theories based on the new types. The consequent tension between these two traditions was both critical to the transformation of architectural language and clearly visible in the work of architects building in Paris, particularly in the work of Auguste Perret. This article proposes a rereading of Perret's work, identifying uniquely French representational and constructional traditions as the context for interpreting his work. Moreover, contradictions in Perret's work from 1928 to 1940 reveal certain aspects of the rationalist debate in France and, thus, aspects of French modern architecture.