If we were to credit two individuals with creating the popular mental image so many of us carry of Paris, it would almost have to be Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Hector Guimard.
Thierry Bézecourt/Wikimedia Commons
Haussmann, tasked by Napoleon III to modernize Paris gave us the broad boulevards and tall readily-recognizable apartments that line them, uniformly, while Guimard and his fellows led the Art Nouveau revolution that broke the uniformity and, in essence, put the icing on the cake, the curves on the stone.
Beyond his buildings, of course, he added the style that marks all our mental memories of the Paris Metro; he designed over 140 of the Metro’s entrances, and many have survived or been revived.
Haussmann had imposed strict limits on most buildings: six-stories high, limited ornaments, nothing protruding over the street, simple ashlar stone and a few more restrictions. In the 1890s, the rules were relaxed, leaving room for what was to come, and the city began, in 1898, giving an award for the best facade of the year.
The first year’s winner was Guimard, for Castel Béranger, an apartment house that was the first Art Nouveau residence in the city. Guimard, just beginning his work as an architect. Between getting the commission and starting the work, Guimard visited Brussels and met Victor Horta, the first architect to build in Art Nouveau style. Guimard returned to Paris and talked the owner into letting him try the style.
The initial reaction to the building, opened in 1898, was mixed. Its friends and much of the public loved it, with all its detailing, sculpture and references to nature; its sharper-tongued critics derided it as Castel Dérange, citing especially its lobby.
While Castel Béranger was Guimard’s first explicitly Art Nouveau building, it was not his first major commission. That honor belongs to Hotel Jassedé, a villa built for a Paris grocer. Built in 1893 when Guimard was 26, it is sort of a predictor of what was to come. It veers from the Haussman classical style toward almost a medieval look.
Its asymmetrical windows, and the use of brick and coarse-cut stone are a sharp contrast to the Haussmann norm, as is the use of ceramics above windows and doors and especially at the roofline.
In the ensuing years, Guimard was busy with commissions in Paris and elsewhere, including his Metro work; more of his buildings can be seen in Paris streets, although many are either gone, or vastly changed during the years before Art Nouveau was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1960s. Skipping ahead in time to around 1910, here are three more buildings worth a close look.
Hotel Mezzara, built in 1910, was a private mansion for French industrialist, decorator and designer Paul Mezzara who made his fortune in the lace industry. The house was squeezed into a block occupied by apartment houses.
Ralf Treinen/Wikimedia Commons
While the building looks today as if it clearly needs some loving care, and the interior is not available to see, there’s some hope that may change; a plan has been under discussion for some time to turn Hotel Mezzara into a museum highlighting both its designer and occupant.
In the case of this next building, owner and designer are one and the same, or perhaps two and the same. Hotel Guimard was built as his own home and studio by Guimard in 1909, at the time of his marriage to the painter Adeline Oppenheimer. The large windows on the upper floor provided light to her studio.
Minor lifestyle note: Despite Hotel Guimard having a large and ornate dining room, the building had no kitchen. When the Guimards entertained, caterers carried the cooked dishes from elsewhere!
During the long period after Art Nouveau fell from fashion—Guimard himself worked for a while in Art Deco style near the end of his working career—his widow offered the home to France for a Guimard Museum. Sadly, no one was interested, and instead it was divided up as apartments. With kitchens.
The Agoudas Hakehilos synagogue in the Marais district was Guimard’s last major project before World War I, and the only religious building he ever designed. Because it is shoehorned into a narrow space, Guimard turned to an undulating facade where other ornamentation might not have fit. It’s still in regular use, though the Guimard skylights have been covered over.
Synagogue images by Gerd Eichmann/Wikimedia Commons
Aside from his work as an architect, Guimard continued to teach at Paris’s design schools through much of his career and to operate a furniture business based on his designs. Although no original Guimard interiors survived the years of neglect, many museums feature his furniture in exhibits. The buffet below is in the Bröhan Museum in Berlin
Starting during World War I, when he realized a lot of destroyed housing would need to be replaced, he turned his mind to ways to mass-produce economical housing. Some of the earliest patents for materials and methods we now call modular construction belonged to Guimard.
