This work concerns about a century of production of the metropolis and manufacturing of its landscapes by housing. By its ascendancy in the constitution of our cities, the housing models more than any other program of urban landscapes. In the genesis of the city, there is so a housing environment: assembly, interweaving units, spaces and forms.
                               
We can approach the understanding and the study of the accommodation by the object, the singular, and the architectural example, by the set, the mass, and the quantity, and by the revelation of common denominators on an inversion of paradigms allowing to understand the city through commonplace and everyday life. Both approaches, which combine the set and the example, re-interrogate the architecture by revaluing transverse criteria: the smallest common denominator indicates just as much as the biggest.
 
Housing approaches recursively the urban understanding, with a homothetic transformation between the whole and its components: images within images in abyss where accumulation and multipulation speak exactly about architecture. The macro and the microphone mix up; it concerns qbout less town planning than architecture seen as whole and sum. Reflexion on the housing of Ile-de-France concerns both urban landscapes and symbolic residential realizations.
                             
The first impression is the landscape; we comprehend cities and their components by their settings and associations. Here the architecture is approached by its capacity to produce density and to saturate. Here everything is about mass and sum. The housing history is approached as a collective history. –Emmanuel Combarel