Metz, Lorraine 57000

A meeting between modernist architecture and the Lorraine horizon, an old aerodrome club-house inscribed as a historical monument, signed Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé. Approaching the aerodrome, at the heart of a 3,000 m² grassy plot, appears a building imagined by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. The former aerodrome club-house where it was built stands out from the region's traditional buildings thanks to its façades, which combine plastered masonry with light tones and wide glazed openings, highlighted by a bright red frame. Natural light fills the interior spaces, revealing the lines of the architecture and opening views to 180 perspectives. The structure was co-signed by Le Corbusieran eminent architect and urbanist of the modernist movement, whose work rests on a search for balanced proportions and clarity of volumesand the Lorraine designer-forgeron Jean Prouvé. Prouvé was noted for his works combining steel and aluminum with a precise method of assembly, which lends the present construction its functional elegance. The roof, an assembly of prefabricated aluminum elements, consists of two back-to-back shells placed on a central gutter, a silhouette reminiscent of two airplane wings poised to take off, giving the whole an architectural identity where technical precision dialogues with aeronautical imagination. The building underwent a restoration in the early 2010s, based on Le Corbusier's original plans to restore stylistic coherence. The edifice is listed as a historical monument for its façades, roofs, load-bearing structures, and chimneys.