Les Roseaux is a 1.2 hectare campus in Bérou-la-Mulotiere, a small rural commune in the department of Chartres.
Almost exactly 100km from Paris, it sits across from Tillières-sur-Avre on the south bank of the Avre River, the historic boundary of Normandy. This marshland area, home to a rare "Mercury" damselfly, has been terraformed over the centuries in many different ambitious projects, from agriculture to industry to warfare to culture.
Usine Metallurgique de Cuivre (1911-1946)
The earliest of the five surviving buildings on site were built in or around 1911 by CGE, the Compagnie Générale d'Électricité (General Electric Company), as part of their copper processing business. Local lore suggests the site was chosen for the ore that could be found in its mineral rich black earth.
Formed in 1898 in the spirit of American corporations like General Electric, CGE rose to be a national powerhouse by constantly shapeshifting, acquiring and selling off electric-related industries as modernization and war constantly changed the landscape of Europe in the 20th century.
It first built the copper facility seen in the image above on the northern side of the Avre in Tillieres around 1903. CGE expanded across the river to Bérou-la-Mulotiere around 1911 with two steel-frame buildings: an assembly shed and a large two-story copper foundry with a butterfly roof, the latter seen under construction below.
A third auxiliary building was added to the southwest of the assembly shed by 1912, both of which were later either replaced or expanded. By this time, the new foundry seems to be in operation and the large smokestack across the river appears to have been razed, suggesting the Bérou foundry was built as a technological upgrade to the prior structure. This rapid innovation and ongoing capital expenditure was a hallmark of CGE, which constantly acquired new businesses, deaccessioned others, and spun off subsidiaries.
The postcard below left, postmarked to 1915, shows the inside of the foundry of Bérou. A gantry can be seen above what appears to be a press and a flywheel that together may have been used to process molten copper and stamp it into plates. Another interior view from the same era (below right) shows workers in an adjacent building scraping clean the copper plates.
Interior view of the copper smelt showing workers and equipment on the south side of the upper floor, c.1915 (left); Interior view of the assembly shed next to the smelt in which workers are seen scraping the copper plates clean, c.1913 (right)
The financial crisis of 1929 wreaked havoc on commodities, slashing the price of copper. Jules Rapp's essay , "Aux origines de la Compagnie générale d’électricité" ("On the origins of the General Electric Company"), describes how CGE doubled down on its electric utilities and spun out its copper processing business to a subsidiary, Electrocuivre (Electrocopper) in 1930, simultaneously upgrading its existing metallurgical facilities to electric furnaces. The image below shows the addition of transformer building on the bottom right of the frame that was built at this time to supply the high voltage necessary for this new way of melting copper.
The images below give a sense of the kind of machinery that would have been installed inside this new building (engineering drawings of contemporaneous transformers can be found here). The one modernist concrete building on site, it would have been a labyrinth of wires and buzzing coils generating interference patterns of invisible electromagnetic fields.
Transformer technology c.1930
Military Training Facility (1946-2000)
The military transferred ownership of the ruined site to the mayor's office of Bérou in 2000, which subsequently sold it off to an actor/director couple, Jean-Claude and Marie-Francoise Broche.
Espace Roseau (2012-2019)
The Broches aquired the site in 2000 and began renovations on two buildings: the auxiliary building, which would become their home residence, and the assembly shed, which they would spend over a decade fashioning into a restaurant and theatre for their own productions. The first performance was given in 2012.
From 2009-2018, they put on theatre performances at a theatre in nearby Verneuil-sur-Avre. In 2012, after over a decade of hard work, they inaugrated their own theatre, Espace Roseau.
They put on many performances, including The Alchemist. It closed in 2017 and the couple sold the site in the spring of 2023.
Evening events at the Espace Roseaux guinguette