The Shoah Memorial of Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis) offers the Forgotten skyscrapers of la Muette (1931-1976) exhibition devoted to the five symbolic towers of the city of la Muette and then of the Drancy camp. Until March 6, 2022.
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of their construction, the Shoah Memorial of Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis) proposes to restore the major role played by the five towers of the city of la Muette through a unique exhibition, between history and architecture.
This ” garden city »Differs in more than one way from the previous ones: the industrial manufacturing processes for the construction of the first skyscrapers in the Paris region on the one hand, and on the other hand, its use as an internment and prison camp. transit to deportation, which made it one of the places of memory of the Shoah.
Built in the early 1930s, these fourteen-storey skyscrapers were then symbols of modernity. Designed by architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods with engineers
Vladimir Bodiansky and Jean Prouvé, they remain a very good example of the rational architecture of the 1930s. They thus dominated the representations of the city then, during the war, those of the internment camp of Drancy which settled in theirs. feet.
The history of these skyscrapers then becomes closely linked to that of the camp. From July 1942 to August 1944, 63,000 Jews – out of the 75,000 deported from France – left Drancy, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. These towers will be destroyed in 1976 when the Drancy Memorial, designed by Shelomo Selinger, was inaugurated.
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In addition to this abundantly illustrated story, the exhibition gives an account of the individual fate of those who designed the skyscrapers, but also of the prisoners who drew and described them, thus helping to fix the image. Models, the film Construire, postcards and photographs are presented, as well as facsimiles and originals of books and architectural reviews which complete the iconography of the disappeared towers of Drancy.
On May 25, 2001, the city is classified as Historical Monuments as ” major architectural and urban development of the 20th century […] and also because of its use during the Second World War first as an internment camp, then as a regroupment camp before deportation, which today makes it a high place of national memory. ».
The forgotten skyscrapers of La Muette (1931-1976)
Until March 6, 2022
Shoah Memorial, Drancy
110-112 avenue Jean Jaurès
93700 Drancy
Phone. : 01 42 77 44 72
[email protected]
www.memorialdelashoah.org
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