Le Corbusier’s Cité Frugès, Prototype City of Workers in the 1920's

Description of the project by Le Corbusier

M. Frugès  told us: "I authorize you to carry out your theories in practice, even with their most extreme consequences, and I wish to achieve really conclusive results in the reform of cheap housing: Pessac must be a laboratory. I fully authorize you to break with all conventions and to abandon the traditional methods. In a word, I ask you to pose the problem of the house plan, to find its standardization, to use walls, floors, conforming roofs to the strictest solidity and efficiency, lending themselves to a real taylorization by the use of the machines that I authorize you to buy.You will provide these houses with interior equipment and devices that will make the house easy and pleasant. As for the aesthetics, that can be the result of your innovations, will no longer be the one of the traditional houses, expensive to build and expensive to maintain, but of the contemporary era. The purity of proportions will be its true eloquence. "

Pessac is a bit of a Balzacian novel. A generous man wants to show his country that the issue of housing can be resolved. Opinion shifts; the jealousies awake; building corporations, from the local small entrepreneur to the architects, are worried about the new methods that could upset the situation they have acquired. Then, little by little, an atmosphere of hostility is created. The village of Pessac was built in less than a year by a Parisian company that replaced the failing local teams. But in 1926, at the end of the works, a deaf opposition was born in the administrative departments which had to transfer the files of the acceptance of the road and consequently to order the installation of the water in the village. So, only the authorization to lease or sell could be granted.

Three years later, in the spring of 1929, the files were not signed and for three years the village was empty of habitants. However, two ministers took care of it personally and came to visit Pessac officially. M. de Monzie, Minister of Public Works, in 1926; M. Loucheur, Minister of Labor in 1929. The enthusiasm which followed the official ministerial visit gradually succeeded the anxiety and, after three years, the press in several countries wrote that Pessac was uninhabitable because it was built on erroneous principles. Finally, thanks to Mr. Loucheur's energetic intervention, an investigator went back to the origin of this troubling adventure and finally found the causes of the lack of water. This is a painful and severe lesson to be categorized in the annals of the idea, and shows that the new initiatives clash with public opinion, and that opinion is waging war on ideas.

Pessac is designed because of the reinforced concrete. M. Frugès, the self-sufficient industrialist of Bordeaux, had said: "I would like to allow you to apply your theories."

The goal: the cheap.

The means: the reinforced concrete.

The method: standardization, industrialization, taylorization.

Structure: A single reinforced concrete beam (Pima floor) of 5 meters, for the entire housing development, etc. etc. Team Division: Each team performs the same job.

This is an example of modern urbanization, where the historical memories, the Swiss chalet or the Alsatian dovecote were left in the museum of the past. A mind devoid of romantic impediments, seeks to solve a well-posed problem.

Polychrome. An illustrious esthete, returning from Pessac, said: "A house is white."

We gave the standard of appreciation: white facades.

When house lines created an opaque mass, we camouflaged each house: the facades on the street alternately brown and white.

A white lateral facade, the other pale green. The encounter on the ridge, light green or white, with dark brown causes the volume suppression (weight) and amplifies the spreading of the surfaces (extension).

This polychromy is absolutely new. It is basically rational. It brings to the architectural symphony, elements of extreme physiological power.

The concerted conduct of physiological sensations of volume, surfaces, contours and colors can lead to intense lyricism.

The building plot of Pessac is very tight. The gray cement houses made an unbearable compressed clump, without air.

Color could bring us space. Consider the color, as a carrier of space. Here is how we have established fixed points: certain facades painted in pure burnt sienna. We have fled from the line of houses: ultramarine blue.

We have confused certain areas with the foliage of the gardens and the forest: pale green facades.

Extract from Le Corbusier, Complete work, volume 1, 1910-1929