Noisy-le-Grand's 2 Postmodernist buildings are among the most photographed housing complexes in Europe. Manuel Nunez Yanowsky's Arènes de Picasso arranges 540 apartments around two massive disc-shaped volumes flanking a circular plaza — social housing reimagined as Roman arena. The scale is theatrical: residents live inside monumental sculptural forms that refuse to accept the anonymity of conventional housing blocks.
Ricardo Bofill's Les Espaces d'Abraxas — a tripartite complex of Theatre, Palace, and Arch — applies Neoclassicist columns, pediments, and axial symmetry to prefabricated concrete social housing. The result is a stage set at urban scale, a housing estate that became the filming location for dystopian cinema. Together, these buildings represent Postmodernism's most ambitious social programme: the conviction that public housing deserved the grandeur traditionally reserved for palaces and monuments.
