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.

[1][2] 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.

[5] 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.

During this time, Ferret introduced Frugès to the avant-garde magazine L'Espirit Nouveau where he first learned of and became interested in the ideas Le Corbusier would develop in his 1922 manifesto Toward an Architecture.

"[9] The site was chosen because it was surrounded by forests and previously unbuilt, as well as for its proximity to the factories where its residents would be employed, the railroad, and a tuberculosis hospital.

[2][9] The complex's forest location is an influence of the Garden City movement, which held natural landscapes were important for the health and well-being of urban residents.

In 1928, the French government began giving low-cost loans to low-income workers, which aided the purchase of individual dwellings over time.

Le Corbusier took into account prevailing social and economic factors, and was determined to build the plan to provide people with low-cost, predetermined, homogeneous cubist structures.

Le Corbusier painted panels of brown, blue, yellow and jade green in response to the clients request for "decoration".

[11] Scholars have seen these panels as an attempt to dissolve the building's mass into planes and the landscape, transposing cubist and purist experiments with spatial perception into architecture.

[14] The complex contains five distinct housing types of one to six units named after a physical characteristic: the two-story quinconces (staggered), zig-zag (Z-formation), arcade, and isolé (free-standing) and the three-story gratte-ciel (skyscraper).

During site visits to both projects on April 7, 1925, Le Corbusier was dissatisfied with the quality of work, calling it an "extremely precarious and dangerous situation"[3] (for instance, the foundation of a dormitory at Lège had collapsed and residents had to be evacuated[4]).

By May, after some reticence from Frugès, a team from Summer's studio consisting of a foreman and eight craftsmen had restarted work on the project, at much higher wages.

This, along with issues creating hollow walls with even thicknesses, meant the use of CMU-block infill, laid by hand, was necessary to achieve the desired "high-precision, machine-made look.

[4] In October of 1925, Frugès sent a letter to Le Corbusier noting one of the gratte-ciels was sitting on the planned route of a provincial road and suggesting density cuts to accommodate the municipality.

"[15] Sigfried Giedion references Pessac (as well as the Villa Savoye and the League of Nations building) in 1941's Space, Time and Architecture as an embodiment of his concept of transparent space-time.