La Manufacture à Saint- Dié, September 2024

Saint-Dié-des-Vosges is a truly enjoyable little town which boasts two world heritage sites: a small World War I nécropole some 30 minutes walking distance in the eastern suburbs, and of course the famous Duval factory building, the only one of its kind ever realized by Le Corbusier.

Progressive industrialist Jean-Jacques Duval somehow managed to convince the Great Architect to visit the far countryside in order to rebuild his hosiery factory, destroyed during World War II. Constructed during 1948 and 1951 and based entirely on Le Corbusier’s “Modulor”-principles, the building remains in tip-top shape, and was apparently recently renovated. The only qualm I have is that the typical primary-colored ceilings of the pillared ground floor (large red, blue, and yellow surfaces) have not been restored (why?) and remain barely visible today.

The factory remains in active use, surrounded by a brightly blue-colored fence, and I’m not sure it can be visited easily, but some plaques around the building tell the story of the factory and its significance in three languages.

There’s an interesting back story to Saint-Dié-des-Vosges:  As the German troops were retreating from Alsace in November 1944, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges was largely destroyed and needed to be completely rebuilt from scratch after the war. As Le Corbusier was already onsite and involved in the planning for rebuilding the local factory of his friend Jean-Jacques Duval, in 1945 he put forward an unsolicited proposal for a radical new city based on his architectural vision of the New City. These plans, however, were met with considerable skepticism both from local burghers and officials back in Paris, and eventually were fully rejected, resulting in only the Duval-factory ever being built. The rest of the town was rebuilt based on a less revolutionary but still thoroughly modern master plan by rival architects Jacques André and Paul Malot. The surprisingly grand local tourist office has a small pamphlet for sale explaining the full story along with a number of nice maps showing Le Corbusier’s originally proposed urban vision. The local Musée Pierre-Noël reportedly also has a scale model of Le Corbusier’s proposal – but its opening hours did unfortunately not fit my schedule.