La Chaux-de-Fonds

On 5 May 1794, a devastating fire destroyed two-thirds of all buildings in La Chaux-de-Fonds, causing over one million livres in damage. Rather than rebuild the old medieval village of narrow lanes, the authorities commissioned engineer Charles-Henri Junod to design an entirely new urban plan in 1835. Inspired by Dr Bernhard Christoph Faust's 'Sonnenstadt' (City of the Sun, 1824), Junod created a strict grid of parallel east-west streets, each row of buildings followed by gardens, ensuring every watchmaking workshop received maximum natural daylight.

By the 19th century, La Chaux-de-Fonds had developed the etablissage system: a decentralised network of up to 3,000 small home workshops, each specialising in one component of a watch. Gem-cutters, escapement-makers, profile turners, and over 100 other specialist professions each contributed a single part, with an etablisseur coordinating final assembly. Karl Marx described the city in Das Kapital (1867) as 'a huge factory-town' where the entire settlement functioned as 'a single watch manufactory.'

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, later known as Le Corbusier, was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds on 6 October 1887 into a family of watchmakers and musicians. He studied at the Ecole d'Art under teacher Charles L'Eplattenier, whom he later called 'my only teacher.' In 1911-1912, the 24-year-old designed Villa Jeanneret-Perret (Maison Blanche) for his parents -- his first fully independent architectural project. The white-plastered house with four central pillars foreshadowed his later theories of the plan libre and pilotis.

Louis-Joseph Chevrolet was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds on 25 December 1878, the son of watchmaker Joseph-Felicien Chevrolet. In 1887, the family moved to Beaune, France, where Louis developed a passion for bicycle racing. He emigrated to the United States in 1900. In 1905, in his first automobile race, he defeated the legendary driver Barney Oldfield with a mile time of 52.8 seconds. On 3 November 1911, he co-founded the Chevrolet Motor Car Company with William Crapo Durant, though he later sold his stake in 1915.

The Salle de Musique in La Chaux-de-Fonds was built in 1951 and inaugurated in June 1955, designed by architects Rene Chapallaz and Hans Bieri. Its walls are covered with walnut wood panelling assembled using lutherie techniques (the craft of violin-making), which is considered the secret of its extraordinary acoustics. More than 450 recordings for prestigious labels have been made there. Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau famously said: 'From the point of view of sound, the most beautiful piano in the world is in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a delightful little concert hall.' Arrau recorded there repeatedly between 1978 and 1991.

The watchmakers of La Chaux-de-Fonds were politically radical: their independent home-workshop system fostered egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values. In 1869, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin travelled to the Jura and found a receptive audience among the literate watchmakers. The Jura Federation became the centre of the anarchist wing of the First International, and the Congress of Saint-Imier (1872) was a founding event for the international anarchist movement. In 1880, a congress held in La Chaux-de-Fonds adopted 'anarchist communism' as its doctrine.

Charles L'Eplattenier (1874-1946) and his students at the Ecole d'Art in La Chaux-de-Fonds developed the Style sapin (fir tree style, 1905-1914), an original local variant of Art Nouveau. The artistic language drew on the Jura's native flora, especially the fir tree, with its branches, cones, and needles abstracted into geometric ornament. The Crematorium (1909-1910) is considered the masterpiece of the Style sapin period. Young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) co-designed Villa Fallet (1906-1907) in this style for watchmaker Louis Fallet.

The Musee International d'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds holds the world's largest collection devoted to the history of time measurement: approximately 10,000 objects including watches, clocks, automata, tools, and engravings from the 16th century to the present. The museum opened in its current avant-garde underground building in 1974. The collection originated in 1865 when the Watchmaking School began assembling old timepieces. La Chaux-de-Fonds sits at 992 metres above sea level, making it the highest city in Switzerland with over 30,000 inhabitants, with harsh winters and heavy snowfall.