Chambre de commerce: the Competition a Glassmaker Demanded

The Chambre was not building alone. It had teamed up with the Société industrielle de l’Est, six hundred members, the richest trade association in the region. In August 1903, Daum proposed a competition open to architects from four départements. Five responded. Émile Toussaint and Louis Marchal won, with a neoclassical design.

That design was not built as it stood. The plans were substantially altered before construction began, and the building was finished in 1908. Three bays of pale stone rise above the street. Around the windows, the stone is laden with sculpture: this decoration comes from Jacques Gruber, who is nevertheless a stained-glass painter.

The door is blue. Louis Majorelle supplied the ironwork. The two-leaf grille rises to an oval glass medallion, where the name of the building is written in gilded letters. Around it, the stone is hollowed into a broad arch, edged with a sculpted frieze.

The canopy makes a wave. Its iron edge lifts in the middle, drops at the sides, and ends in two brackets that run down the wall like stems. Along the crest, a row of small points stands up toward the sky. The glass set on top lets the daylight through.

The glass continues behind the door. Gruber made the stained-glass windows of the building. One of them, “Le paysage vosgien” (“The Vosges Landscape”), fills an arched opening with a wooden frame. The top is almost white. Along the sides hang stalks of pink flowers. At the very bottom, the landscape arrives: blue mountains, pale water, a tree with green leaves.

Not everything stayed in place. A few years after the opening, the architects added a story under a high slate roof: the covered terrace disappeared. Then the glass went. In 1955, for the Chambre’s centenary, the great glass window of the exchange hall was taken down. The furnishings of the Société industrielle’s room are gone too; part of them was reassembled at the Musée de l’École de Nancy. The Chambre de commerce still occupies the building.