Public tours of a newly-restored Salvation Army shelter in Paris designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret start in April. The tour guides for the 11-storey building, known as the Cité de Refuge, will be the residents of the building themselves who have been trained by the Fondation Le Corbusier.
The Cité de Refuge, which opened in 1933 and takes its forms from ocean liners, is historically significant as Le Corbusier’s first urban housing project and one of only two completed buildings in Paris. It was commissioned by the Franco-American Singer sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, a philanthropist, arts patron and amateur painter who exhibited at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Cité de Refuge was damaged by shelling at the end of the Second World War, and in 1952, Le Corbusier replaced the original glass curtain wall façade with a colourful “brise-soleil” design of concrete sun baffles, now a National Historic Monument along with other elements of the structure.
The €31.7m campaign to restore and modernise the Cité de Refuge and its adjacent 1978 sister structure, the Centre Espoir, was funded in part by the city, region and national governments and completed last November. There are now almost 300 residents across the two buildings, which total 12,700 sq m.
