The story of one visionary at Citroën’s Bureau des Etudes Avancées.
The Bureau des Etudes Avancées Citroën or BEA, under the direction of Pierre Jules Boulanger, was the idiosyncratic French carmaker’s creative ideas laboratory. Fittingly located at number 44 to 48 on the Rue du Théâtre in Paris, it exuded an air of secrecy and mystery. Not just engineers and stylists were employed there but also scientists, mathematicians, physicists and even an astronomer.
Born in 1891, Fridtjof Le Coultre came from the famous Swiss jewellery and watchmaking family of Jaeger-Le Coultre. He had worked as an astronomer at the observatory in Geneva for several years but left and moved to France in the early thirties after a dispute with his boss. There being not much demand for his trade, Le Coultre worked in various jobs to sustain himself and developed and sold an artificial marble-like material that enjoyed some popularity in decorative lamp-posts. Continue reading “The Stargazer of the Rue du Théâtre”
Driven To Write 