Cité Frugès, 1924

From 1924 to 1927, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret realized an experimental settlement of 51 houses in Pessac, named Cité Frugès after the project’s sponsor. From the aesthetic, technical, methodological and social viewpoints, it represents an ambitious and indeed unparalleled undertaking in the history of housing for workers.
Cité Frugès is an incomparable example both of the experimental approach peculiar to modern architects and of the Corbusean desire to transgress conventions and routine expertise. Aesthetically, it is one of the first settlements of single-family houses in the world to be built according to the canons of the new modern aesthetics. Technically, it is an experimental site for the standardization of building techniques. Socially, the project aimed to rid workers’ housing of the picturesque or pessimistic clichés to which it was generally confined.
The innovation is primarily conceptual. Technically and spatially, the houses are designed on the same 5 square metre module, and a basic architectural type called B1L, consisting of two levels of a bay and a half. The challenge is the project’s economy, using a standard module without falling into repetitiveness and monotony.
The addition of one or more additional bays led to the development of five different types, many nuances and variations enriching this simplified classification: arcaded houses; skyscrapers; staggered houses and zig-zag houses; twin houses face to face; an isolated house called Maison Vrinat.

The ambition is still to link art and social progress. The sponsor and his architects conceive the workers’ housing as a work of art. The forms are those of the architectural avant-garde. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret used a varied polychromy to amplify the purely aesthetic design of these primary geometrical forms, likewise on the urban scale of the settlement.