An international-style stadium and a district with 115 Art Deco houses. Our visits allow you to discover the two new architectural styles of the early 20th century.

All of the last 18 hectares of the farmland of Lescure Castle, still present, were sold to make a subdivision of 600 houses. Half of this land could not be built because of the passage of the stream, the Peugue, in the middle, subject to regular floods.
These non-building lands were to be devoted to sport and to cycling, the most popular sport around 1920/1930. A first velodrome was created there in 1924, which went bankrupt in 1930. The city renamed a second and huge multi-purpose stadium with a 400-metre velodrome, a track track and in the center a collective sports field, rather rugby at the time. In the middle of the hygienist period, the town halls compete to build large sports complexes: stadiums, swimming pools, baths and showers.
Lescure is the monumental participation of the city of Bordeaux in this obligation to promote sport. By the chance of a railway trip, this great project will be entrusted to a Bordeaux architect not banal at all.
Our man, Raoul Jourde (1889-1959) is a modernist architect who replaces stone with concrete. He was trained in the workshop of the Perret brothers, who introduced concrete buildings in Paris (1902), then at Joseph Hoffmann, Austrian builder of the Stocklet Palace in Brussels (1908), then Léon Azema, French architect of the present Palais de Chaillot. Raoul Jourde is therefore a specialist in this new material: concrete, at a time when his colleagues build mainly in stone.
In 1934 he will propose to the city a completely new project: an all-concrete stadium whose places will be protected from the rain by a light vault in moulded concrete. At that time metal roofs were built on stands that required support pillars in the stands, which hindered the view. Concrete was only used as a cinder block, like a stone to build a wall, the plasticity of liquid concrete injected into moulds allowing other forms that were ignored in France.
And Jourde will have to call on an Italian company camouflaged under the name of "France colonies" and directed by the grandson of Garibaldi, to realize its novelties. He will imagine to bend wide and long a thin concrete veil to be able to realize a cantilevered roof up to 22 meters, protector of the rain. This is the vault so characteristic of the Bordeaux stadium. The vault of the roof undulates in the sky, it seems to fly in the void above the heads. The view is 360° clear, without any pillars. This technical feat is always striking when you enter it today. It is the innovation in the use of materials, the architectural innovation of the voutain, and the final aesthetic rendering that have convinced, for 22 years, associations of neighborhoods, to ask for its classification, to prevent its destruction around 2016, and who have just obtained his inscription in the inventory of historical monuments.
Both stadiums benefit from this protection, the 1938 Jourde stadium, the current UBB rugby stadium. And the annex stadium inaugurated in 1941, and built by the architect Jacques d'Welles, which took over the architectural elements of the great stadium: the Lombard arcades and the vaults. We will explain on the spot that the stadium of Raoul Jourde, if it was built during the Art Deco period, is not at all Art Deco style. It belongs to the other style born at that time: the international style.
For the residential area, its construction was problematic. 315 lots (out of the initial 600) could be built since 1920. It was the future owners who chose their style of facade with their architect or mastermind. The subdivision will be built over 20 years, starting at the top (rue Frantz Despagnet, rue Descartes) and ending at the bottom with the rue and place des Cèdres. The new owners will start to use the two old fashioned styles of Bordeaux: ecclectism especially (which is the predominant style in Bordeaux, appeared around 1850, and which mixes all styles by overloading various reliefs each m2 of facade) and a bit the neoclassical style (the one of the eighteenth century if admired) with some flowers and ribbons on the facades more flat and sober than the ecclectics.
It is 1927 that appears here, at 7 rue Marceau, under the brilliant pencil of Pierre-Henri Avinen, a first house of Art Deco style, with very little decoration added. A single very geometrical frieze and visible functional volumes (garage) that animate the facade. This originality is complemented by windows with unusual shapes: cut-off panels and custom-made art metalwork. A total of 115 houses of this style will be built. Some with a majestic facade, as at 53 avenue du Parc de Lescure.
The appearance of the individual car around 1925/27 will upset the plan of the houses to add a garage. The Art Deco style was to be well assimilated by the Bordeaux residents and met with great success both in the administrative buildings, the sports facilities (stadium, swimming pool, bath-showers), and in the individual houses.
Entire streets will be built in this style (rue du Commandant Charcot). Yet the other new style, even revolutionary at that time, remains absent. No international style house in the neighborhood, it will be necessary to wait 1960 and the «9 rue Marceau» where a beautiful house of this style will be built.
Architects, on the other hand, are following the expansion of the international movement in France (Villa Noailles 1922, Cité Fruges 1924, villa Cavroix 1928, Villa Savoye 1930, Piscine Judaïque in Bordeaux 1934, much closer to the international style than Art Deco, Villa Serusat in Bordeaux, 1934, too transformed).
The Art Deco style itself will gradually come closer to the international style, lose its added decoration, and become, around 1935/40, the Paquebot style. We can clearly see this evolution in the street and the place des Cèdres with the two passenger houses facing each other. Art Deco concerned all the arts of the time: painting, architecture, but also the so-called minor arts: jewelry, fashion, cabinetry, ceramics, table art, etc. This short period thus had a worldwide influence with a remarkable unity of style and France was the driving force for the last time.
The Art Deco style disappears after 20 years of existence but the international style is still alive today, after a century of existence. It is the absolute triumph of concrete and its plastic possibilities on stone.
At the initiative of the associations that protected the Lescure stadium: Let’s preserve the Lescure stadium and the Collectif des Habitants, tours of the stadium and the neighborhood will be organized on site. An exhibition on the International style, on the Art Deco style, on Raoul Jourde, on the actions of defences and local protection led by the associations will be proposed.
Bordeaux prides itself on having protected the most beautiful French stadium of the hygienist period, while very few monuments of this period have been preserved.
The visits to the stadium and the neighborhood are complementary and can be followed.