Henri Grieshaber (my children's great great grandfather) was one of several architects who contributed to making La Chaux de Fonds one of Europe's finest art nouveau cities. The most famous of these architects was of course Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier's buildings in La Chaux de Fonds and surrounding area have been well documented. This post brings together all I can find regarding the surviving buildings of Henri Grieshaber, Le Corbusier's lesser contemporary.
The most impressive of the surviving buildings is at 141-43 rue Numa Droz - a combination of factory, offices and residence built for the jeweller Jules Bonnet in 1911:
At around the same time he built a similar combination of factory and residence across the road, at 154-58 rue Numa Droz:
In 1910 he had built a less grand combination of factory and residence for the watchmaker Alphonse Arnoud:
And in 1920 he built a factory for the manufacture of marine chronometers:
A factory at 1 rue du Tertre, built by Grieshaber in 1911, has recently been modified by the architectural firm Sareg. These are photographs from their website:
Decorative features of the apartment buildings at 2 & 5 rue du Tertre and 5-7 rue Cernil-Antoine are highlighted in the brochure on La Chaux-de-Fonds' Art Nouveau riches:
I don't know about the rue Cernil-Antoine, but the buildings on the rue du Tertre are definitely by Henri Grieshaber. Here are Jacques Lasserre's photographs of these buildings:
Henri Grieshaber's most substantial project, designed in partnership with Jean Crivelli (1871-1960), was the Maison du Peuple, inaugurated in 1924.
Henri, as a committed socialist, refused to take a wage higher than that of the ordinary labourers working on the building.
The history of the Maison du Peuple is told in this publication by the Bibliothèque de la Ville de La Chaux-de-Fonds.
This is Henri and Jeanne with their son Jean:
Jean Grieshaber (1930-1989), was, as these articles from L'Impartial testify, an eminent Latinist and Sinologue.