The city of Saint-Die-des-Vosges has the only industrial building the Swiss architect conceived. Always active, the site of the Claude and Duval hosiery houses eighty workers today.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, and he died in 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the Maritime Alps. He took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier, the name of one of his Albigensian ancestors in 1920. Sculptor, painter, decorator, he was also an urbanist and architect, and he established his first architecture studio in 1917 in Paris.

Le Corbusier, co-founder of the architecture review "L'Esprit Nouveau" (The New Spirit) is one of the agitators of the Modern movement, which emerged with the appearance of new materials like reinforced concrete. He mixed with other great architects like Oscar Niemeyer or Jean Prouve. He completed more than seventy projects.

In November 1944, two-thirds of the family-owned Claude and Duval hosiery was destroyed when the right bank of the city went up in flames. The Germans started the fire in an attempt to slow the advance of the Allied troops. In conceiving his new factory, Jean-Jacques Duval, the company head, called on Le Corbusier, with whom he had developed friendly ties around fifteen years before. In fact, in the 1930s, he had found a book about the work of the Swiss architect in his father's library. He had then used his status as a student at the Ecole Polytechnique in Zurich to meet him.

It's one of the first buildings conceived with the application of the Modulor, which Le Corbusier developed in 1945, after twenty years of research on proportions. It contains all the characteristic elements of the architect's work. As with buildings (designed) for housing, the architect determined the apertures according to the interior spaces, defined according to their (respective) activities. In the factory, the circulation is the tissue that dictates the program: from trimming on the third level, to clothing-making on the second, then packaging on the first, and deliveries in the basement, where there are also changing rooms and bicycle parking (200 spaces). The fourth level is reserved for administration and leadership. The latter still makes use of the the original furniture by Jean Prouve today.

Le Corbusier, setting in opposition the image of the "black factory" of the 19th century, where work was considered "to be a penitence" to that of the "green factory" where "work can give its laborers the sense of its greatness," set out to transform the architectural framework of places of production, and in turn, have an impact on the psychology of the philosophy of work. Entirely encased in glass, the facade is equipped with solar shading, oriented in such a way as to stop solar radiation in the summer (heat and glare) and allow their penetration in the winter (accrued luminosity, energy savings).

Adept at polychromy, the architect added touches of color to the ceilings and pipes, in such a way symbolizing the circulation of fluids.

Named consulting urbanist on the framework for the reconstruction of the city of Saint-Die-des-Vosges, Le Corbusier presented an urbanism project that, following debate, would be rejected unanimously by "bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, worker, Socialist CGT, Communist, etc. groups that arose to block such a design." At the time, the Ministry of Reconstruction did not push on in this subject. Despite his bitterness, Le Corbusier accepted, out of his friendly ties to the directors, to participate in the reconstruction of the Claude and Duval factory, where work began in 1948 and was completed three years later.

Classified as a historic monument in 1988, the factory is still in its original state and still belongs to the same family – Remi Duval, the current director and Le Corbusier's godchild. The fact that it has always been active (eighty employees work there for high-end designers) explains why you cannot visit it. Not well known to the general public, this manufacturing building remains the only realized industrial building by the architect. The registration of the city of Saint-Die-des-Vosges in a European tour of Le Corbusier's cities has granted it new visibility today. As far as the abandoned project for the reconstruction of the city, a model is on loan from the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, currently on view at the city museum.

What are some other examples of "green factories" today? What are your thought on Le Corbusier's emphasis on function flows?

Original article, originally published in French, here.

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