Le Creusot. Urbanistique patronale
Authors: Frey Jean-Pierre 
Published: October 2016

Le Creusot. Entrepreneurial city design.

The analysis of projects conceived by an industrial entrepreneurship and its technical departments help us to understand the specific action of a subject in the history of a town.

Le Creusot has the advantage of having been formed and produced according to entrepreneurial options directly connected with the aims of industrialisation and without an urban space conceived prior to the industrial implantations. It does not mean that we must consider that the standards of living, the architectural typology, the urban morphology are only indebted to entrepreneurial action, but the actions made on space according to the general lines of the entrepreneurship show such a degree of coherence that in the realizations and projects we can see some logics in this action as well as the contradictions with which it was in conflict.

The author first studies the modalities of action on space (the architecture according to a special typology) of a historical subject. The head figure must not be included. It is anonymus architecture in so far as no famous architect signed any project. On the contrary, architectural conception comes from the work of specialized teams of which it will be necessary to define the field of proficiency and the brinds of training.

The identification of technical authors of the building contracting with obviously a distribution of skills between architects and engineers is important for the history of social housing. So we can think of going beyond the vision of an architecture defined only by the knowledge of building techniques or comfort, the only economical conditions of its production, of going beyond the conception of the modalities of action of architectural forms on space according to an autonomous logic.

The second part of Jean-Pierre Frey' s analysis addresses this last point. In it, he shows the links between the social-professional status of the workers and the creation of urban space in so far as decisions made concerning urban configuration influence social configurations. The entire corpus utilized takes on meaning only with respect to what the ruling class considers as the life style and. habitus of the different categories of employees.

The types chosen do not correspond exactly to these habitus or adhere scrupulously to the demands of the various sectors of the population according to their degree of urbanisation (which is what property acquisition housing projects and contracting performed by the inhabitants themselves criticized ). The organization of housing into types was justified by the avowed desire of the entrepreneurship to influence social relationships.

The large place afforded to the relationship between the intérieur and exterieur of housing in the analysis of the types is justified by the fact that intermediary spaces, which take on great significance indetermining these types, play a fundamental role in the meaning of the differences of the inhabitant's social status.

Indeed, if one compares the conception of architectural types with the urbanisation process induced by industrialisation in a rural milieu, it is possible to hypothesize that the principal elements in the existing symbolic architectural configuration of the Le Creusot habitat (as is likely to also be the case of all industrial zones conceived along the some historical directives) are made up of urban differential signs in the relations between the domestic space of the housing units (considered as cells) and the public space, by enlargement of intermediary spaces between the street and front door, according to a subtile play of social differentiation, as a function of the socioprofessional status of the groups of inhabitants. A very stylistic esthetics of formal architecture, where the traditional forms of rural housing would have, at the end of the 19th Century, bowed the signes of urban development binded to the status of the inhabitant with respect to industrial production and the localization of the habitat in the urban morphology with respect to centers of urbanization.

The entrepreneurial conception of types would have thus parcelled out distinctif signs of the inhabitants status through a certain number of distinguishing elements, formal characteristics of architectural types. By analyzing architectural types, it is possible to discern the historical conception of both the architecture and the social configuration of the entrepreneurship : for the first time, for the needs of industrial production and for its profit, it has made architecture the chief means of its policy making, and social-economic «program» ; it thus attempts to combine architectural elements with economic and social criteria which allow for the designation of its factory employees.