Anyone on their way to the top of the Colline Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, to visit Le Corbusier's chapel will come across another concrete gem at the foot of the mountain: the headframe of the Puits Sainte-Marie coal mine.
The overgrown ruins and collapsed roofs of the French Arthur de Buyer coal mine do not suggest that a French record was broken here in 1900.
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On the occasion of International Art Nouveau Day, celebrated each year on June 10, a look at how this ornate architectural movement found its way into the most unlikely of places like coal mines, power stations, and railway yards and the long, sometimes heartbreaking battles to save what remains.
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