Climat de France (also known as Cité Climat de France / Oued Koriche)

Climat de France is a major social-housing development on the hills above Bab El Oued in Algiers, designed by Fernand Pouillon and built mainly between 1954 and 1957 (with parts continuing into the late 1950s). Conceived during the late colonial period—at the height of the Algerian War—it was planned as a large new neighbourhood to rehouse residents from overcrowded and informal settlements.

Architecturally, the project combines modern mass housing with a powerful sense of Mediterranean urban form. It is organized as a dense ensemble of mid-rise blocks around the famous monumental courtyard, the “Place des 200 Colonnes”, a huge, stone-lined public square framed by an arcade rhythm of two hundred columns and ground-floor shops, creating shade and a civic, almost palace-like scale. Pouillon’s design uses simple repetitive housing units, but elevates them through monumental composition, thick masonry-like construction, and climate-responsive spaces—arcades, galleries, sheltered passages, and courtyards—echoing the logic of the Casbah (shade, enclosure, and layered public-to-private transitions). The result is both an infrastructure-scale housing machine and a dramatic urban monument, where everyday life is staged around one of the most striking public spaces of 20th-century North African architecture.