A century of
history

The city of Paris, a land full of demoted fortifications, donated a 9-hectare strip of land on boulevard Jourdan for the creation of a Cité universitaire. The law also required the City of Paris to reserve 19 hectares on the adjacent land for the University of Paris. There were 28 hectares that made up the initial property of the Cité universitaire.

André Honnorat take his presidency of the Fondation de droit privé, recognised as a public utility.

Founded by Philippe Roy’s initiative, who was the High Commissioner of the Canadian government, at the beginning of the 1920s, the house was approved by two architects, the Frenchman Emile Thomas and the Canadian Georges Vanier.

The Maison des étudiants belges et luxembourgeois was built thanks to Jean-Hubert Biermans, a businessman who made his fortune in Canada. This monumental building evokes traditional Flemish and Walloon architecture.

The house was destined to serve as the home for Argentinian students living in Paris and to strengthen the ties between the two countries. Its realisation was entrusted to three French and Argentinian architects.

The house was constructed thanks to the generosity of Jirohachi Satsuma, the grandson of the wealthy Japanese spinning merchant. The narrow plot required the construction of a tall house, inspired by Japanese buildings. The large lounge and hall are decorated with two murals painted by the famous painter Foujuta: “The arrivals of Westerners in Japan” and “The horses”.

The Armenian diplomat and philanthropist Boghos Nubar made a donation to finance the building of an Armenian Pavilion. The building, by the architect Léon Nafilyan, carries on the tradition of Armenian architecture.

Inaugurated before its founders, the American couple Mabel and Homer Gage, the building was designed to embody Franco-American relations and to offer accommodation to American students and researchers in Paris.

The Swedish student house owes its existence to the “L’Amitié Franco-Suédoise” association. It was designed by the architects Peder Clason and Germain Debré.

The Fondation danoise was financed by private and public means. It was designed by professor Kaj Gottlob. The building’s style expresses both the classicism and Nordic functionalism of the interwar period. At the same time, it is simple, plain and welcoming.

This building is one of the campus’s masterpieces. It was realised by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in a decisively avant-garde style, heralding the “radiant cities” of the future. It is the Cité universitaire’s first modern building. The Fondation Rosa Abreu de Grancher, designed by Albert Laprade, was inaugurated in the same year.

The design of this building, financed by John D Rockefeller junior, was entrusted in 1933 to the American architect Jean-Frédéric Larson. He was inspired by classical French architecture, in particular the Château de Fontainebleau.

The idea for this house came from Prince Pierre de Polignac, the grandfather of the current Prince Albert II. In 1929 the first donation allowed for 50 beds. The building was designed by Julien Médecin. The Collège d’Espagne was inaugurated in the same year.

The idea for its construction came from a committee that was created in 1924 by Frans Vreede, the director of the Centre d’études néerlandaises in Paris. It is the only work by Willem Marinus Dudok built in France thus constituting a unique testimony to one of the most important architects of the école hollandaise in the interwar period.

The Cité universitaire was occupied. Some houses were requisitioned by German troupes, then by the Allies, and suffered a lot of damage.

The inauguration of two new houses in the new construction era: the Fondation Victor Lyon and the Maison des élèves ingénieurs Arts et Métiers.

The project was conceived in 1947 when Tunisia was still under French rule. It’s the work of the architect Jean Sebag. The house is distinguished by the quality of its interior equipment and by its furniture made by Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Alain Richard, Marcel Gascoin and Pierre Faucheux.

The Maison de Norvège was built thanks to a donation from a Norwegian committee that had received grants from both France and Norway. It is the work of the Norwegian architect Reidar Winge Lund. Initially designed to have 50 rooms, the building’s size was eventually doubled to meet the University of Paris’s wishes.

The Maison des industries agricoles et alimentaires was financed by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Association nationale de la meunerie française. It was designed by the architects Francis Thieulin and Xavier de Vigan who were on a tight budget. They thus opted for modest volumes with two wings that were centred around the vertical of the staircase.

Built thanks to a donation from the Royal Cambodian Government, the building was designed by the architect Alfred Audoul. From the 1970s, the civil war in Cambodia troubled the community of Cambodian students in Paris. In 1973, the house’s residents faced violent incidents. It became uncontrollable and the house was closed. It only reopened its doors some thirty years later.

Its construction was financed by the Brazilian Institute of Educational Studies. The building was realised by Lucio Costa and Le Corbusier, two great figures in the modern architecture movement.

The first Lebanese woman to hold a doctorate degree from the Sorbonne, Victoria Khouzami founded the Franco-Lebanese cultural association in 1948 to promote the construction of a pavilion intended to welcome 100 high-level Lebanese students. Its conception was entrusted to the architects Jean Vernon and Bruno Philippe.

In 1960, José Henrique de Azeredo-Perdigao, the president of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, pledged to finance the construction of a house for Portuguese students and researchers. It has borne the name of André de Gouveia since 1974.

Thirteen years after its independence from the British Empire, the act of donating money to construct an Indian house was approved by the Indian government as suggested by the Indian Ambassador to Paris. In 2013 an adjacent pavilion was constructed to the east of the first building. 

In the context of Iran’s international openness and its privileged cultural exchanges with France, the Shah, encouraged by his wife Farah Diba, an alumnus of the Collège néerlandais, decided to build a house with 100 rooms for Iranian students. This building was realised by Claude Parent, André Bloc, Mossem Foroughi et Hedar Ghiai and would be the last pavilion constructed at the Cité internationale during the second phase of construction. It was named the Fondation Avicenne in 1972.