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Concept
Cité Frugès de Pessac
Summary
The Cité Frugès de Pessac (the Frugès Estate of Pessac), or Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès (the modern Frugès quarters), is a housing development located in Pessac, a suburb of Bordeaux, France. It was commissioned by the industrialist Henri Frugès in 1924 as worker housing and designed by architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, who were responsible for the development's masterplan and individual buildings. It was intended as a testing ground for the ideas Le Corbusier had expressed in his 1922 manifesto Vers une Architecture and was his first attempt designing low-cost, mass-produced collective housing in his trademark aesthetic. Drawings of some of the buildings were subsequently included in the second edition of the text.
The Cité was planned to contain 135 housing units in four sections, but only two sections (consisting of 51 units) were realized due to financial difficulties. By the time they were completed, the houses were three to four times more expensive than envisioned and about twice as expensive as comparable houses on the market. The workers refused to move in, forcing Frugès to sell the individual houses in the same year after a failed attempt to sell the entire estate. Over the next decades, the houses were heavily modified by their inhabitants, including the addition of pitched roofs and decoration, the resizing of windows, and the enclosure of patios.
On December 18, 1980, No. 3 Rue des Arcades was listed as a French monument historique. The whole complex was subsequently designated a French Zone de Protection du Patrimoine Architectural Urbain (an Urban Architectural Heritage Protection Zone). In 2016, the district was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, along with 16 other projects.
Henri Baronet-Frugès (1879-1974) came from a wealthy family operating one of the last sugar refineries in Bourdeaux, of which he became a manager in 1913. While he also owned wine and carpet factories, Frugès considered himself more an artist than an industrialist and continued his artistic pursuits and interests throughout his life.
Official source
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