Cité Napoléon

The Cité Napoléon features a striking iron-and-glass facade that hides a complex of sixty-four apartments behind a locked gate. Built in eighteen fifty-one by architect Marie-Gabriel Veugny, it served as one of the first experiments in social housing in Paris. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte personally funded the project to provide hygienic living quarters for the working class. Its residents once shared communal kitchens and a central laundry room, a radical design intended to encourage social order through shared space and strict light requirements.