Architect, born in Lyon, SC France. He studied at the École des Arts Decoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts, and was influenced by Viollet-le-Duc and Victor Horta. He became the most important Art Nouveau architect active in Paris between 1890 and World War 1. For his outstanding architectural scheme, the Castel Béranger apartment block (1890), he designed every aspect of the building and its interiors. Other work includes the Hôtel Guimard (1912). He is best known for the famous Paris Métro entrances (18991905), made of cast iron, many of which are still in place.
Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10, 1867 - New York, May 20, 1942) was an architect, who is widely considered today to be the most prominent representative of the French Art Nouveau movement of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Guimard did not originally have such a high reputation, because he did not have any followers;
Years of study
Like many other French nineteenth-century architects, Guimard attended the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he became acquainted with the theories of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Guimard became devoted to this style when he visited the Tassel Hotel in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta.
In 1898, he designed the Castel Béranger , which displays a tension between a medieval sense of geometrical volume, and the organic "whiplash" lines Guimard saw in Brussels.
A flashing glory
The Castel Béranger made Guimard famous and he soon had many commissions. This culminated in 1909 with the Hotel Guimard (his wedding present to his rich American wife) where ovoid rooms contain unique pieces of furniture, which are considered integral parts of the building.
If the skylights favored by Victor Horta are rather absent in his work (except in his 1910 Mezzara Hotel ), Guimard undertook astonishing experiments in space and volume.
Guimard also employed some structural innovations, as in the extraordinary concert hall Humbert-de-Romans (1901), where a complex frame splits the sound waves to lead to perfect acoustics, or as in the Hôtel Guimard (1909), where the ground was too narrow to have the exterior walls bear any weight, and thus the arrangement of interior spaces differ from one floor to another .
The curious, inventive Guimard was also a precursor of industrial standardization, insofar as he wished to diffuse the new art on a large scale. The idea is taken up – but with less success – in 1907 with a catalogue of cast iron elements applicable to buildings : Artistic Cast Iron, Guimard Style .
Guimard's art objects have the same formal continuity as his buildings, harmoniously uniting practical function with linear design, as in the Vase des Binelles , of 1903) or this sketch of his furniture. Guimard created abstract two-dimensional patterns that were turned into stained glass (Mezzara hotel, 1910), ceramic panels (Coilliot house, 1898), wrought iron (Castel Henriette, 1899), wallpaper (Castel Béranger, 1898) or fabric (Guimard hotel, 1909).
Oblivion
In spite of Guimard's innovations and talent, the press and the public quickly grew tired of him--not so much with his work, but his personality.
Guimard's work is itself victim of inherent contradictions of the ideals of the Art Nouveau movement: his best creations remained financially inaccessible to the general public, and his attempts at standardization of materials, parts, and measures never could keep pace with his very personal architectural vocabulary.
The rediscovery
Many of Guimard's buildings were destroyed after his death, but he started to be rediscovered in the 1960s. Still, one hundred years after what Le Corbusier called the "magnificent gesture" of Art Nouveau, most of Guimard's buildings remain inaccessible to the public, and he has no museum devoted to him.
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