The Florival textile industry was established over the centuries and still leaves its traces today. Industrial buildings have adopted, depending on the era, different architectural forms influenced by the volume of the machines as well as by the sources of energy and its transmissions. There still remains today an important industrial landscape, which is divided into factories, workers' housing estates, gymnasiums, parks and industrial villas.
Scalable Factory Forms
The first architectural form in the textile industry was the block factory, which spread from the end of the XNUMXth century.e century. The building takes the form of a narrow and elongated rectangular block whose number of levels varies between three and six. The workshops are lit by multiple windows aligned on all the walls. Each floor consists of a large room and a plateau without partitioning. The machines are arranged along the entire length, in two rows. The spinning or weaving looms are generally upstairs, while the openers, threshers and carders are located on the ground floor. The name factory-yard is given for a set of block-factories forming an interior courtyard. This is the case of the company Ziegler and Greuter in Guebwiller.
One of the first bungalows in Alsace was installed in 1851 at the instigation of Édouard Gast, an industrialist in Issenheim. The front facade, in cut stone, recalls medieval castles with the presence of arched bays and crenellated towers. The spinning workshop offers a vast space without partitioning, covered with vaults. The lighting is zenithal: it is done by natural sunlight thanks to windows that pierce the vaults. The plan of the Gast spinning mill is a forerunner of single-storey factories which are then rather covered with sheds. In the industrial world of the time, the appearance of buildings in sheds, from the second half of the XNUMXe century is a revolution. They take on the appearance of sawtooth roofs with one side facing north: thus, the workshop can benefit from zenithal lighting. This type of architecture on the ground floor appears initially with the weavings and is then generalized. At the same time, the use of the steam engine spreads and factories free themselves from hydraulic power. From now on, the factories settle along the canals and railways.
One of the first reinforced concrete buildings in Alsace was built in 1911 in Guebwiller. This is the old UTEX twister, designed by the architect Sautier, demolished in 1974, which was located rue de la Monnaie. Nevertheless, there remains a trace of this reinforced concrete architecture. This is the “Louvre” of Ets Schlumberger (built in 1920), still visible in Guebwiller. Reinforced concrete is made of concrete and steel: it combines the compressive strength offered by concrete with the tensile strength of steel. This material then makes it possible to construct buildings with very long-span beams.
A varied industrial architecture
The industrial heritage of the territory is not only made up of factories, but has other built traces of the industrial era. In the first place, we can mention workers' housing. Until the construction of the first cities, the workers lived little or not at their place of work. Three years before that of Mulhouse, in 1856, the first city was born in Guebwiller on the initiative of Jean-Jacques Bourcart. An 1867 study by the DMC mentions this city as a model: there were 139 dwellings there in 1870, with a variable living area of around 40 to 50 m² and a monthly rent of 14 to 18 francs. It consists of apartment buildings with a distributive central staircase. A second example appears with the Zimmermann establishments which, in 1867, built a workers' estate with eighteen dwellings in Issenheim.
Finally, the industrial landscape is also made up of another form of housing, those intended for employers. One often perceives in the residences and villas of industrialists a certain taste for historicism, the design of these buildings being inspired by elements from earlier periods such as Antiquity or the Renaissance. The most striking buildings of this type are the Villa du Bois Fleuri, built in 1864 for Charles Bourcart – which consists of a castle, a porter's lodge and a richly wooded park – and the Villa des Glycines, built for Émile de Bary, whose veranda was decorated with ceramics by Théodore Deck made between 1886 and 1891, currently kept at the Musée Théodore Deck et des Pays du Florival.
A rich industrial landscape
The territory of the Community of Communes today still has many material traces of this industrial past. It would take too long to mention them all, but a few buildings are worth mentioning: the Neuenbourg castle (former castle of the prince-abbots of Murbach, it became a calico factory in 1793 then a weaving of silk ribbons of 1805 to 1947), the Ziegler, Greuter & Cie factory (former Dominican convent, a company consisting of spinning, weaving, bleaching and a canvas printing workshop moved there in 1806, before being transformed into housing after the Second World War), the Baumann silk factory in Soultz, the Schlumberger factories in Guebwiller (founded in 1810 and still in operation), the Ets Marin Astruc in Buhl (a spinning mill from 1835, closed in 1963, fed by a remarkable wooden aqueduct still visible today), or even the workers' habitats of Buhl or the Marseillaise park in Guebwiller, built for the well-being of the workers.
