Saint-Nicolas-d'Aliermont workers' estate

Robert Duverdrey ran the Duverdrey & Bloquel watchmaking factory. On 15 May 1917 he met Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and asked him to build houses for his staff: an estate of 40 to 50 homes. He planned several house types, along with a building that would combine the cooperative and rooms to let. He later specified that the façades should be treated differently for workers and for foremen.

The press covered the project from 1918: Georges Benoît-Lévy, a fervent champion of garden cities in France, devoted two articles to it, in The Survey on 2 February and in The Town Planning Review in April. Yet the show houses raised building difficulties and cost too much, and the factory's board ended the project on 7 June 1919. The studies made here would serve as the basis for the workers' estates at Lège and Pessac.

Over time the show houses have been considerably altered, among other things by render on the façade of one and a garage added to the other. They now belong to private owners.

The project belongs to Jeanneret's research on serially built workers' houses. He proposed an estate of 43 houses on either side of a central street running from the cooperative to a dead-end square, and studied three types, as Duverdrey had asked. Type A, intended for foremen, has six rooms on two levels with a basement. Types B and C are semi-detached, with a similar number of rooms but a different layout; B has two storeys, C only one, and B was dropped because it was judged too tall.

A semi-detached pair of type C was built in 1918 as a show house. It measures 8 m by 5.50 m, with a central staircase dividing it in two. On the ground floor the kitchen and laundry were on one side and a bedroom on the other; under the roof, upstairs, were two bedrooms and the sanitary rooms. Each house had a garden at the front and a yard at the back.

The houses were originally to be built of prefabricated concrete blocks; Jeanneret proposed making them on site with machines from a Swiss company, but the client required brick instead of concrete.

Private houses, altered.