Cité du Lignon

The Cité du Lignon comes down to a single gesture: one continuous building, folded into a broken line 1,065 metres long, set on the edge of the plateau above a meander of the Rhône, in the commune of Vernier. It is the longest residential block in Switzerland; you walk along it as you would a street, past its 84 stairwells and the three bus stops that had to be installed for this one building. Two towers stand with it, the taller reaching 91 metres.

The whole thing came out of a public decision. In 1962 the State of Geneva set aside the 280,000 m² of the Lignon farm estate to build one of the largest housing schemes in the canton. Work began in September 1963; the first stage, 1,846 flats, was finished in September 1967, and a second brought the total to 2,780 dwellings in 1971. Under the architect Georges Addor, the teams cast the walls in sheet-steel formwork and had heating, plumbing and ventilation delivered ready-assembled.

What still strikes the visitor is the decision about the ground. By folding the whole programme into one continuous volume, the designers built on only 8% of the estate's surface; the rest went to lawns, trees and the wooded slope running down to the Rhône and to the Grebattes stream. Every flat runs through the building, open on both sides. The estate is listed in the Federal Inventory of Swiss Heritage Sites of National Importance.

Why this place is remarkable

A building a kilometre long asks a question few neighbourhoods put so plainly: what do you do with the ground you have not built on? At the Lignon the answer comes down to one figure — 8% coverage for 2,780 dwellings — and can be checked on foot, between the lawns and the trees, all the way to the slope above the Rhône. The estate's continuous plan has been studied by architects who came from as far away as Japan.

History and origin

The farm estate was first called Gourbattes, then Grebattes, after the stream that crosses it; in 1791 Francis d'Ivernois bought it and renamed it Lignon, after the small river in the Forez that flows through Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée. The estate itself belongs to another moment entirely: in the late 1950s the Geneva law on the development of urban agglomerations opened the countryside to schemes sized for tens of thousands of inhabitants, and Georges Addor took part in that planning before building several of them. The Lignon was designed for 10,000 people; it housed 6,800 in 2010.