Visited March 2024.

I visited the Cité Frugès in Pessac while living in Bordeaux, which is what my review will focus on. I don't think it's worth coming here just for Le Corbusier, but it's worth the half-day detour for those travellers who're in Bordeaux as a base for other sites in the area.

As a new(-er) community member who's benefited immensely from previous reviewers, I'm continuing my mission to provide some 2024 updates to sites that others may not have visited in some time.

The other reviewer for the Cité Frugès unfortunately did not access the new visitor centre that has just opened. Upon first moving to Bordeaux and having a stroll round the neighbourhood with just the street signs to guide me, I found the whole thing very disappointing and indeed shocking that it was in such a state of disrepair. Pessac has invested quite a bit of money into the Cité Frugès recently and now has a full-time employee devoted just to giving free tours, as well as podcast-style audio guides (which aren't well-advertised). The Cité Frugès would be very disappointing without them.

Tours run at sporadic times and must be pre-booked online exclusively. They're conducted in French only, but I asked the guide and she said it's not unusual to have non-French speakers follow along too. She was absolutely excellent, a doctoral candidate on Le Corbusier. She utterly lives and breathes this stuff and was a breath of fresh air from other staff at other French WHS. 

I showed up on a rainy Thursday morning and it turned out I was one of only three people on her tour that morning. The other two were a mother-and-daughter pair, both of whom had studied architecture at university for many years. This is what I always appreciate about France -- never are you spoken down to on tours like this and specialists feel like they have a lot to gain from being there in person too.

Some points about the Cité Frugès itself:

The guide was quick to point out to me that the inclusion of the Cité Frugès is supposed to be an example of Le Corbusier's "juvenalia." (This is bizarre to me as it's not even close to being the oldest work inscribed in the WHS). It is not the most sophisticated, nor the most renowned example of his work, but it was the first time he was allowed carte blanche to experiment with styles. There is also a remarkable density of different goals and styles within a few streets of each other, showing how the architect developed his previous ideas. The area was intended as social housing, but was never fully completed nor fully lived-in, but was the springboard for years of negotiations between Le Corbusier, Frugès, and the city of Pessac and continues to be a model for the conservation-private ownership bureaucracy in France... maybe this is how they scored their criterion (vi) points!! 

All but one of the houses are privately owned, some still as social housing. The one that isn't privately owned is the location for the new visitor centre and the guided tour concludes with a trip inside. This is the only one you can access.

The houses were basically abandoned for much of the 20th century, from the 1930s to the early 2000s, when they finally became protected. They narrowly avoided demolition many times. Many buildings appear in quite a shocking state of disrepair or dirtiness with unkept gardens and crumbling walls. The guide explained to me that this is part of the conservation régime (!!!!!). Since the new law came into effect, owners do not have the right to repair or maintain anything that wasn't originally part of Le Corbusier's vision, even if it wasn't completed by him. This includes paint that isn't the original colour, interior floorboards, glass, anything. A lot of the gardens are in disrepair as a result as Le Corbusier envisioned them with thin wire fencing. The stone walls thus cannot be cleaned or maintained and must be left to crumble. The owners are allowed to demolish them and replace them with originals if they so wish, but there’s no obligation to do so. The result is stuff tends to stagnate.

This site wasn't even recognised as significant, never mind a WHS candidate until very recently in its history. The attempted conservation and tourism project has been noticeable (even vis-à-vis different reviewers who came as recently as 2021), but we're in the early stages of what intends to be a multi-decade process. Sadly, it seems to rely on the private financial contributions of people who privately buy and own the houses. Unless there are a few dozen multi-multi-multi millionaire Le Corbusier enthusiasts willing to relocate to a few small houses in a below-average suburb of Bordeaux, I don't see how it's going to come to fruition unless something changes in the administration.

Definitely come here if you're in Bordeaux and think to book on a tour, purely for the expertise of the guide in explaining everything you ever wanted to know about Le Corbusier. -- You quite possibly have one of the world's experts to yourself free-of-charge to take you around. Don't expect to be stunned by his masterpiece while you're there, though.