This social housing complex for the working class was built between 1931 and 1934 in Drancy, northeast of Paris, as one of the first major housing projects designed according to CIAM principles. However, a few years later, one of the buildings in the complex drastically changed its function: in 1941 the Drancy concentration camp was installed there, which, until August 1944, was the France´s hub for the anti-Semitic policy of expulsion. This camp was, during three years, the main internment center for Jews before being deported to Nazi death camps, most of them in Auschwitz.
Un siglo de arquitectura europea: La Cité de la Muette pointed out the failure of the 20th century utopias based on this paradox that turns a social housing into an anti-Semitic concentration camp.