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I thought I'd make three extra extended posts, one a week, and had been trying to think of a topic that wasn't all gloom and doom and ranting. So here's a post on an architect/designer whose stuff I do like, whose work was focused on elevating the human spirit through art, including making the built environment pleasant for common, everyday users. In fact he sought to inject a bit of joy into the quotidian.
Our parents twice took the gaggle of us children to Paris for brief visits. (We took the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry, this was long before the Channel Tunnel.) On the first visit, my dad took us down a side street to show us something. It was something like this.
As my father said as I took in the curvy cartouches in grey-green wrought iron that formed the railings preventing people from falling into an ordinary set of descending steps with white-tiled walls ... the two wrought iron stalks arching over the top of the steps bearing the overhead sign Métro in vegetative capital letters (the T sticking up jauntily) and with red glass flowers as lamps ... and the matching wrought iron frame for the name-plate (capital and lower-case letters in the same curvy font) and the advertising plaque (there's a system map on the back) ... this is—or was—how they do Underground entrances in Paris.
The creator was Hector Guimard. He was commissioned in 1900 to design the ground-level station entrances for the Métro system at its inception, after the design competition produced only entries that would have been too bulky. The majority of entrances, like the one above, are made up of a kit of standardized components. Design drawing for the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe station:
He did the lettering himself, by hand, to fit it into different widths. There was some grumbling; that's the national sport of France; but the Métro entrances not only gave the new system an identity, they popularised the Art Nouveau style.
The Guimard Métro entrances are now protected landmarks (most since 1978, after public tastes swung back to loving Art Nouveau). Some appear in thousands of Instagram posts, while others, especially those without the lamp arch, languish more or less marooned in the streetscape: here amid bustle and rebuilding, here under an elevated highway and only available as an emergency exit, forgotten except by taggers. He also designed some fancier ones that acquired the nickname libellules, "butterflies", from the shape of the canopies; this one has been saved and restored.
(Note the yellow panels; I think they're hand-painted.) One has been saved by relocation; one has been reconstructed. The few above-ground station buildings were demolished long ago, like this one.
Around the same time, Guimard designed a concert hall (completed in 1901, demolished in 1905!) Here's his own publicity postcard:
And in 1914 he designed a synagogue for a Russian Orthodox congregation.
But most of his buildings were private houses and flats. Here's a villa in a seaside town in Normandy:
a house in Lille designed to showcase enamelled lava (the green material; note the sign, the client operated his business from a warehouse behind the house):
a 1911 house in Paris incorporating a showroom for the client's business manufacturing lace and other fancy fabrics:
a country house in Villemoisson-sur-Orge, south of Paris:
a house in the wealthy Parisian suburb of le Vésinet (garden side view):
a house in Auvers-sur-Oise for an industrialist patron:
another house in a Normandy seaside town, detail of the now removed porch and balcony:
and a house in Sèvres commissioned by a widow, one of his own publicity postcards:
Unfortunately she didn't really like it; he took down the tower after it became unstable, but it's now gone. I'm sure I'm not alone in being very sad about that.
His first Art Nouveau building was this block of flats (1895–98):
Have some details (I tried and failed to put these side by side):
And here's another of his publicity postcards, of himself in his studio in the building, which gives an idea of the interior decoration that he designed for the residences, and his furniture design.
He later designed this somewhat more self-effacing block of flats for the same family as the Auvers house (Paris was being built out with a lot of moneyed people investing in all those mansard-roofed blocks):
and from 1913 his own family lived in a corner house that included studios for both him and his wife, a Romantic painter (detail of façade, the studio windows in particular have been altered):
This photo of the dining room gives a taste of the interior. The chairs have interlaced initials G and O for Guimard and his wife's maiden name, Oppenheim; note that the table appears to be growing out of a mossy hummock; and in the background is the mother of all built-in buffets.
More inside and outside photos of how it used to look can be found here on Wikimedia Commons
His wife was Jewish and American; seeing the writing on the wall for European Jews, in 1937 the family emigrated, and he died in New York in 1942. She offered the house in Paris, together with its contents, to the French state but they declined; it's now flats and groups of their furniture are on exhibit in various museums; French Wikipedia has an entire article on the ensemble from her bedroom (well, English Wikipedia does too, but it's a tiny stub). Here's her writing desk:
Guimard didn't start off an Art Nouveau designer; he trained at the École des Beaux Arts and was an instructor at the École des arts décoratifs until 1910. He appears to have been influenced by Arts and Crafts architecture: this school building was originally by him in 1895. After the acceptance of plans for that first block of flats, he met Victor Horta, the doyen of Art Nouveau, on a trip to Brussels and talked the client into letting him change everything except the massing and interior layout. The style is and was associated with expensive buildings for clients who could afford to spend large amounts indulging a taste for the sumptuous and the flamboyantly eccentric. This was the sitting room in a house by Horta; note the bespoke stained glass:
Several department stores also owed their cachet to the owners having paid for Art Nouveau, including the Eliseev Emporium in St Petersburg:
But some architects in the style did consider it important to cheer up the street, not just their clients and their clients' tenants, notably in Finland; here's a detail of a building in Helsinki constructed in 1900–01 as live/work flats for doctors and now an office building known as "Agronomy House":
Guimard's ready design of lovely Métro entrances is in this tradition. And although I don't know how much his family actually enjoyed his ceilings encrusted with frond-like bits—some of the rooms look a bit like grottos—he was very much into large windows, making the fullest use of those wide, flattened arches with curved wrought iron not so much dividing them as accenting them. Even the synagogue has a huge window. Later in his career he tried to adapt to Art Deco, but I don't think he found it as much fun.
Our parents twice took the gaggle of us children to Paris for brief visits. (We took the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry, this was long before the Channel Tunnel.) On the first visit, my dad took us down a side street to show us something. It was something like this.
As my father said as I took in the curvy cartouches in grey-green wrought iron that formed the railings preventing people from falling into an ordinary set of descending steps with white-tiled walls ... the two wrought iron stalks arching over the top of the steps bearing the overhead sign Métro in vegetative capital letters (the T sticking up jauntily) and with red glass flowers as lamps ... and the matching wrought iron frame for the name-plate (capital and lower-case letters in the same curvy font) and the advertising plaque (there's a system map on the back) ... this is—or was—how they do Underground entrances in Paris.
The creator was Hector Guimard. He was commissioned in 1900 to design the ground-level station entrances for the Métro system at its inception, after the design competition produced only entries that would have been too bulky. The majority of entrances, like the one above, are made up of a kit of standardized components. Design drawing for the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe station:
He did the lettering himself, by hand, to fit it into different widths. There was some grumbling; that's the national sport of France; but the Métro entrances not only gave the new system an identity, they popularised the Art Nouveau style.
The Guimard Métro entrances are now protected landmarks (most since 1978, after public tastes swung back to loving Art Nouveau). Some appear in thousands of Instagram posts, while others, especially those without the lamp arch, languish more or less marooned in the streetscape: here amid bustle and rebuilding, here under an elevated highway and only available as an emergency exit, forgotten except by taggers. He also designed some fancier ones that acquired the nickname libellules, "butterflies", from the shape of the canopies; this one has been saved and restored.
(Note the yellow panels; I think they're hand-painted.) One has been saved by relocation; one has been reconstructed. The few above-ground station buildings were demolished long ago, like this one.
Around the same time, Guimard designed a concert hall (completed in 1901, demolished in 1905!) Here's his own publicity postcard:
And in 1914 he designed a synagogue for a Russian Orthodox congregation.
But most of his buildings were private houses and flats. Here's a villa in a seaside town in Normandy:
a house in Lille designed to showcase enamelled lava (the green material; note the sign, the client operated his business from a warehouse behind the house):
a 1911 house in Paris incorporating a showroom for the client's business manufacturing lace and other fancy fabrics:
a country house in Villemoisson-sur-Orge, south of Paris:
a house in the wealthy Parisian suburb of le Vésinet (garden side view):
a house in Auvers-sur-Oise for an industrialist patron:
another house in a Normandy seaside town, detail of the now removed porch and balcony:
and a house in Sèvres commissioned by a widow, one of his own publicity postcards:
Unfortunately she didn't really like it; he took down the tower after it became unstable, but it's now gone. I'm sure I'm not alone in being very sad about that.
His first Art Nouveau building was this block of flats (1895–98):
Have some details (I tried and failed to put these side by side):
And here's another of his publicity postcards, of himself in his studio in the building, which gives an idea of the interior decoration that he designed for the residences, and his furniture design.
He later designed this somewhat more self-effacing block of flats for the same family as the Auvers house (Paris was being built out with a lot of moneyed people investing in all those mansard-roofed blocks):
and from 1913 his own family lived in a corner house that included studios for both him and his wife, a Romantic painter (detail of façade, the studio windows in particular have been altered):
This photo of the dining room gives a taste of the interior. The chairs have interlaced initials G and O for Guimard and his wife's maiden name, Oppenheim; note that the table appears to be growing out of a mossy hummock; and in the background is the mother of all built-in buffets.
More inside and outside photos of how it used to look can be found here on Wikimedia Commons
His wife was Jewish and American; seeing the writing on the wall for European Jews, in 1937 the family emigrated, and he died in New York in 1942. She offered the house in Paris, together with its contents, to the French state but they declined; it's now flats and groups of their furniture are on exhibit in various museums; French Wikipedia has an entire article on the ensemble from her bedroom (well, English Wikipedia does too, but it's a tiny stub). Here's her writing desk:
Guimard didn't start off an Art Nouveau designer; he trained at the École des Beaux Arts and was an instructor at the École des arts décoratifs until 1910. He appears to have been influenced by Arts and Crafts architecture: this school building was originally by him in 1895. After the acceptance of plans for that first block of flats, he met Victor Horta, the doyen of Art Nouveau, on a trip to Brussels and talked the client into letting him change everything except the massing and interior layout. The style is and was associated with expensive buildings for clients who could afford to spend large amounts indulging a taste for the sumptuous and the flamboyantly eccentric. This was the sitting room in a house by Horta; note the bespoke stained glass:
Several department stores also owed their cachet to the owners having paid for Art Nouveau, including the Eliseev Emporium in St Petersburg:
But some architects in the style did consider it important to cheer up the street, not just their clients and their clients' tenants, notably in Finland; here's a detail of a building in Helsinki constructed in 1900–01 as live/work flats for doctors and now an office building known as "Agronomy House":
Guimard's ready design of lovely Métro entrances is in this tradition. And although I don't know how much his family actually enjoyed his ceilings encrusted with frond-like bits—some of the rooms look a bit like grottos—he was very much into large windows, making the fullest use of those wide, flattened arches with curved wrought iron not so much dividing them as accenting them. Even the synagogue has a huge window. Later in his career he tried to adapt to Art Deco, but I don't think he found it as much fun.
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Thank you! I've always rather liked his style without knowing his name... now I have a reference point to start my own research on him.
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Thoughts
These are awesome. Thanks for sharing. I have boosted the signal.
>> including making the built environment pleasant for common, everyday users. In fact he sought to inject a bit of joy into the quotidian.<<
One of my settings, Terramagne, has municipal artists for the purpose making beautiful bike racks, park benches, water fountains, etc. This fits right in with that.
>> after the design competition produced only entries that would have been too bulky. <<
LOL always give footprint parameters in architecture contests, and while you're at it, pad them. Just throwing out entries that fail the measurements will greatly cut down the work for the judges.
>>He also designed some fancier ones that acquired the nickname libellules, "butterflies", from the shape of the canopies; this one has been saved and restored.<<
That is so beautiful. Looking at the concave shape of the canopy, I'm guessing there must be a drainpipe at the back end to vent rainwater. It'd be a good setup for catching and storing water in dry areas.
>>But most of his buildings were private houses and flats. Here's a villa in a seaside town in Normandy:<<
I am charmed by the blue-and-white picket fence. Here, "white picket fence" is a reference to a neighborhood or family that is boring and trying too hard to be normal. But the blue-and-white version is quite eye-catching.
>>a house in Lille designed to showcase enamelled lava (the green material;<<
That looks like something out of Rivendell.
>> note the sign, the client operated his business from a warehouse behind the house):<<
I like the old practice of work and home being in the same or adjacent places. It makes cities more walkable and therefore more profitable, unlike modern sprawl. Me, I'm out in the country but I have a home office.
>>a house in the wealthy Parisian suburb of le Vésinet (garden side view):<<
I'm betting those angled windows on the front tower follow a staircase.
>>His first Art Nouveau building was this block of flats (1895–98):<<
Now those are beautiful; most modern ones are eyesores.
>>Guimard's ready design of lovely Métro entrances is in this tradition. And although I don't know how much his family actually enjoyed his ceilings encrusted with frond-like bits—some of the rooms look a bit like grottos—he was very much into large windows, making the fullest use of those wide, flattened arches with curved wrought iron not so much dividing them as accenting them.<<
It's a matter of taste and profession. My living room is done in foresty greens and browns, with a big bay window where long ago my father built a planter for my mother, which now has my plants in it. The house is an old farmhouse with Victorian and Arts and Crafts motifs. Nature motifs appeal to folks who like nature. Big windows appeal to people who write, paint, grow houseplants, etc. but they do lose heat -- especially the old ones.
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Re: Thoughts
There were two "butterfly" designs, as I understand it, in versions with just the canopy above a normal enclosure as well as with the side panels, but very few were made and they were almost all destroyed. The one I've shown above is Type B (at Porte Dauphine); here's a rear view showing the drainpipe that you correctly intuited (Commons category):
(They recreated the version without side panels at Châtelet.
Type A, with a different shape of canopy, is preserved at Abbesses station (moved from Hôtel de Ville), in the version without side panels.
Here's his design drawing showing the panelled version:
—That also shows the slope to a drainpipe.
M