In 1923, Henry Frugès, a French industrialist, commissioned a rising star in the field of architecture to design some homes for the workers who labored to build packing cases in his factories in Lège and Pessac, near Bordeaux. The brightly hued houses were pieces of pure modernism, concrete cuboids shorn of decoration. They were starkly beautiful, in the way that modern architecture at its best can be. The architect’s name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris. Today we know him as Le Corbusier.
