WATCHMAKING BUILDINGS IN
THE JURA VALLEY
SWITZERLAND
1. CONTEXT
La Chaux de Fonds is a small town in the Jura Valley near the Swiss border with France.
The town was home to two great birthplaces, the watchmaking industry and Le Corbusier.
In 1794 the original town was destroyed after a huge fire, this catastrophe led to a new planification of the town designed by and for
the manufacture of watches.
The result was a narrow, rectangular grid module that is spaced in such a way that the buildings cannot shade on each other, gaining as many hours of sunlight as possible.
These narrow buildings housed thousands of watchmaking workshops that would later form the great watchmaking companies we know today.
Urbanisme horloger La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle Candidature au patrimoine mondial UNESCO
Urbanisme horloger La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle Candidature au patrimoine mondial UNESCO
Such was the development of industry that,
as we can see in this account of the city's occupations, more than half of the inhabitants worked in it and factories flooded the city.
As can be seen in the plans, most of these factories were located on the northern slope, so that their main facades faced south.
With the development of new technologies and the implementation of new temperature and lighting control systems, the buildings that housed the factories became obsolete for today's watchmaking industry.
Due to their peculiar morphology, these buildings are difficult to correctly accommodate uses other than those for which they were built.
These are some of the examples that are still open today.
The Alpina factory is now a women's gymnasium, Tavannes a mechanical workshop, Bulova an architectural studio and Marvin a Spanish centre.
2. COMPILATION OF DOCUMENTATION AND VISITS
Once we understood the context in which we found ourselves, the first step was to collect all the information, in whatever format, that we could find in libraries and archives in the area. Once collected, we organised it by factory and type of documentation.
The amount of information was huge and very disorganised, mixed timeframes, plans of multiple scales without specification, mistakes in the dates of construction.
We were lucky enough, in the middle of the Covid times, to be able to visit some of these factories, which allowed us to understand more precisely how these buildings, so advanced for their time, worked. Some of them, such as Tavannes or Arsa, kept many original elements such as heating systems, windows and some elements of furniture. However, the most useful visit was to the Zenith complex, one of the few companies still operating in the original complex. It is a very large factory where most of the elements that make up or used to make up their watches are produced in the complex.
Documentation extracted from Archives de l'État de Neuchâtel, Memoire d'ici and Cejare
Documentation extracted from Archives de l'État de Neuchâtel, Memoire d'ici and Cejare
Pictures from the visits to Zenith, Tavannes and Arsa
Pictures from the visits to Zenith, Tavannes and Arsa
3. REDRAWING AND ANALYSIS
In the end we collected and sorted information from 40 factories.
The amount of information from each of them was very varied, so the next step was to redraw, compare and analyse the dimensions of the workshops:
Surface area, window surface, number of workers, furniture dimensions...
4. MODELING
This is the step we are working on. After doing the analisis we realize that the success of these buildings is based on their climatic behaviour, the way in which hot and cold air flows are dispersed. So we decided that our results would be much clearer if we modelled them and subjected them to simulations at different times of the day and night.