Cité Frugès de Pessac

In the 1920s, the Cité Frugès de Pessac emerged as an ambitious experiment in industrial housing. With geometric forms, flat roofs and an eye-catching colour palette, the complex broke with tradition, embodying the radical philosophies and modern aesthetics of the day. However, what began as an idealistic vision quickly faced resistance, as bureaucratic hurdles and social derision reshaped the site’s fate. As the development aged over the decades, the tension between architectural idealism and practical realities came into sharp relief, ultimately altering architectural approaches to mass housing.

Located in Pessac, Bordeaux, the Cité Frugès de Pessac – or Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès – is an industrial housing development designed by Le Corbusier. It was commissioned by the sugar industrialist Henri Frugès, who sought out Le Corbusier after reading the architect’s collection of essays, Vers une Architecture, stating: “I was struck by the author’s common sense. It was highly revolutionary, but the ideas were full of common sense.” Frugès, himself a modernist thinker with great enthusiasm for art and architecture, wanted to bring together art and social progress in workers’ housing.

In the 1920s, shortly after commissioning a development of ten houses for his sawmill workers at Lège near Arcachon, Frugès requested a further 135 houses split across four sectors for his sugar workers in Pessac. This ‘garden city’ was Le Corbusier’s first major commission for collective housing and as such an opportunity to realise his philosophies. Frugès instructed Le Corbusier “to break with all conventions and abandon traditional methods” in this attempt to reform low-cost housing design.

Le Corbusier wrote: “H. Frugès told us: ‘I'm going to allow you to put your theories into practice, as extreme as the consequences may be – Pessac should be a laboratory.’”

Cité Frugès de Pessac broke from the conventional “lean-to” housing type common in Bordeaux at the time, opting for cubic structures with flat roofs and elongated, horizontal windows. Despite being based on a modular system of 5 x 5m, the houses were varied, with five distinct types: the two-story staggered quinconces, zig-zag, arcade, free-standing isolé and the three-story gratte-ciel (skyscraper). Several of them had roofed but not walled areas, to be used as terraces or garages. Le Corbusier intended to use poured concrete but had to settle for clinker block placed by hand, all finished with coloured facades added at the request of Frugès.

At a fortieth anniversary of Cité Frugès de Pessac, he explained: “We both wanted to build economically, but … I asked him to put himself in the place of future purchases, whose eyes are accustomed to decorative effects. It is absolutely essential that we should attract their attention agreeably… Consequently, there must be something about the exterior that pleases them.”

From this, Le Corbusier selected ‘horizon blue’, golden yellow, jade green, off white and maroon colours which were used on exterior walls and carried through into the interior detailing.

Despite this decorative appeasement, the development was not well-received. Opposition came in the pejorative comparison to “a Moroccan settlement” and rumours of a connection to Abd-El-Krim, an anti-colonial figure then leading a resistance to French colonial forces.

In Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited, an intended occupant described the prospect of living there as such: “It was as if we had the plague: ‘What! You live in the Moroccan district?’ It was terrible. I felt as if I was being sent to prison.”

Frugès most ambitious project was never fully realised. Only two of the four sectors, or 50 houses, were built before the project was halted due to bureaucratic and financial challenges. Resistance from the municipality, who refused water supply to the development for several years, and from the intended residents saw the development left vacant and Frugès on the verge of insolvency.

Image credit: Cemal Emden

Eventually, and as the direct result of a new law that offered cheap home-ownership loans to low-income workers, individual houses were sold off. Over the next four decades, these occupants made many changes to their homes. They added pitched roofs, converted long horizontal windows to more convention openings, and added decorative window boxes and gables. They repainted the exteriors in white or colours of their own choice. They enclosed the terraces and garages. And they built sheds in their gardens.

As Philippe Boudon notes in Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited: “It seems that everybody has now converted his ‘machine to live in’ into a ‘chez soi’.”

While many of these changes were undoubtedly rooted in aesthetic preference, a 1970 study by the Centre for Research in Architecture, Urbanism and Construction showed how some were simply responses to practical problems – pitched roofs replaced leaking flat ones and the shapes of openings were changed because replacements couldn’t be found for the original, specially-made windows and doors – which would feed into a larger movement seeking greater involvement of occupants in housing design.

Eventually, the perception of Cité Frugès de Pessac started to change. The area was designated as a Zone for the Protection of Architectural, Urban and Landscape Patrimony, which brought with it strict rules on any new alterations and strongly encouraged the conversion of houses back to their original state. Then in 2016, the district was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, cementing its status as an architectural icon and important example of Le Corbusier’s theories.

Ultimately, Cité Frugès de Pessac’s story is one of architectural vision and human experience. Where Le Corbusier sought to impose order and modernity, the residents created a space that suited their needs and desires – and it is this complex interplay which would go on to inform modern mass housing. With every change, the architect’s vision could not withstand the demands of daily life. Or as Le Corbusier remarked when questioned on this project’s outcome: “It is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.”