Jade-green housing estate, horizon-blue world heritage site

Motorway and railway lines, sub­urban cha­racter and large-scale housing estates: Anyone visiting the Cité Frugès in Pessac will explore an area in an in-between space. The metro­po­litan centre of Bor­deaux is only half an hour away from here, but in the Pessac mixture of flat sub­urban deve­lo­pment and located like an island in between com­mercial and large housing estates, it seems further away than the actual ten kilo­metres. The Cité Frugès is a housing estate in the sou­thwest of France, built from 1923 to 1927, based on a design by Le Cor­busier with Pierre Jean­neret. The trip to the out­skirts of Bor­deaux is wort­hwhile because the Cité Frugès was a debut project for Le Cor­busier. It embodies the first imple­men­tation of Le Cor­bu­sier’s phi­lo­sophy of shapes and colours from the world of angular cubes and struc­tured clarity. And it was his first ever urban planning project.

Of course, the Weis­sen­hof­siedlung in Stuttgart is more famous and most of Le Corbusier’s buil­dings in Europe are in Firminy, a small town near Saint-Étienne and Lyon. Nevert­heless, the Cité Frugès, which is part of the Swiss French archi­tect’s early work, looks like an exem­plary rea­li­sation of his “Five Points of a New Archi­tecture”. The fea­tures of the new archi­tecture he for­mu­lated in the 1920s can also be found in the Cité Frugès with its columns, roof garden, free floor plan and ribbon windows. In addition, there is the imple­men­tation of his “Poly­chromie Archi­tec­turale”, the theory of colour and the colour scheme of a building, which has been vividly rea­lised here.

From Green Garden City Utopia to World Cul­tural Heritage Site

The housing estate was named after Henri Baronet-Frugès (1879–1974). The indus­trial tycoon owned a sawmill, a sugar refinery, as well as vineyards and other busi­nesses. In 1923, he read an article by a young visionary in the coll­ection of texts “Vers une archi­tecture” [Towards an Archi­tecture], in which he described low-cost, mass-pro­duced coll­ective housing in his typical aes­thetic. Frugès was enthu­si­astic. He met the utopian architect and imme­diately com­mis­sioned him to design a garden city housing estate for his workers: a mile­stone for Le Cor­busier! The land Frugès acquired in Pessac was affordable and located outside the centre of the village on a stretch of woodland. Clean air in a rural idyll for the workers. Frugès wanted nothing less than “a labo­ratory”. The neigh­bourhood was to be tailor-made, uncon­ven­tional and entirely free of tra­dition.

51 of the more than 130 units ori­gi­nally planned were built in seven types: Gratte-ciel (the “sky-scrapers”), the Arcade, Quin­conce and Jumelles types, other indi­vi­dually detached houses, the Zigzag type and a type of house that no longer exists. The cubic buil­dings are flat-roofed and often have roof gardens. Cha­rac­te­ristic fea­tures are the open floor plans, the ribbon windows and the pillar con­s­truction on the ground floor. In the meantime, however, the “pilotis”[supporting columns, pillars or stilts] are no longer reco­g­nisable as closed rooms. The client – himself a water­colour painter – and the architect attached great importance to sophisti­cated colour com­bi­na­tions. The exterior walls and façades were “horizon-blue, golden-yellow, jade-green and maroon”.

First scorned, then neglected, today a desti­nation for excur­sions

The blaze of colour did not bring the housing estate any luck. The effects of the Great Depression of 1929 put an end to con­s­truction work, building mate­rials were expensive and not even half of the houses were com­pleted. In the midst of the crisis, Frugès filed for bank­ruptcy, sold his com­panies and left France. The housing estate itself was scorned; the workers refused to move in. Local people called the houses “North African”. Things didn’t improve until the intro­duction of a law that offered low-income workers cheap loans to buy land and build houses. The resi­dents greatly changed the appearance of the neigh­bourhood over the next few decades and the neigh­bourhood visibly dete­rio­rated. From the 1970s onwards, the per­ception of the housing estate changed after pro­fes­sionals and Le Cor­busier fans started to visit, and also thanks to an engineer, who res­tored his ter­raced house in 1973.
It was the beginning of the revival and res­to­ration of the Cité Frugès. This new, old sple­ndour attracts many people who take part in guided tours and visit the new museum “Maison Muni­cipale Frugès-Le Cor­busier”. The estate is now included in the UNESCO World Heritage listed The Archi­tec­tural Work of Le Cor­busier – an Out­standing Con­tri­bution to the ‘Modern Movement’. The 17 sel­ected buil­dings exem­plify the deve­lo­pment of 20th century modernism. The Cité Frugès is in the same league as villas, churches and resi­dential machines in France, Germany, Argentina, India and Japan – not a bad career for a once under-app­re­ciated, then neglected workers’ housing estate.

Author: Jan Dimog, thelink.berlin

Images (all): © Hendrik Bohle / © Jan Dimog, thelink.berlin

Stadt Frugès Le Cor­busier – Pessac
4 Rue Le Cor­busier
33600 Pessac

Author info:

Architect Hendrik Bohle runs a digital magazine on building culture tog­ether with jour­nalist Jan Dimog. On thelink.berlin they have been telling about their dis­co­veries in Europe for years, espe­cially about the con­nec­tions between people and archi­tecture.
When they are not on the road, they curate high-profile exhi­bi­tions, such as the tra­velling exhi­bition on Arne Jacobsen’s archi­tecture.