Dr. Andreas Papadakis - Hector Guimard - Architectural Monograph - 1978

Hector Guimard - Architectural Monograph

Contents: see photo 4.

Many illustrations of designs for buildings and for the Paris metro.

Excellent condition

Nice document from a period.

Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10, 1867 – New York, May 20, 1942) was a French architect who is considered the leading representative of Art Nouveau in France. He had his own role within Art Nouveau, but he did not have followers, left no school behind, and was therefore for a long time regarded as subordinate within the movement. The fact that he had no followers stood in contrast to the great abundance of his architectural and decorative work.
Guimard discovered during his architectural studies the theories of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc from 1863, which laid the foundation for Art Nouveau. Guimard's conversion to the style itself happened quite suddenly. That occurred during a trip to Brussels, where he visited Victor Horta's Hotel Tassel. The characteristic work from this period, Castel Béranger of 1898, designed by Guimard, illustrates this transitional moment when two styles met: the medieval-inspired geometric volumes of the rough construction were covered with the organic line imported from Belgium, the 'whiplash'.
Castel Béranger made Guimard famous overnight, and the large number of commissions enabled him to refine his pursuit of beauty ever further. The harmony and, in particular, the stylistic continuity, one of the great ideals of Art Nouveau, led him to an almost totalitarian conception of interior design, which reached its peak in 1909 with Hôtel Guimard, a wedding gift to his wealthy wife, in which the oval rooms dictated their own requirements for the furniture, parts of which were integrated into the building.
Skylights are, in contrast to Victor Horta’s work at Guimard, almost absent, except in his later hôtel Mezzara from 1911, but otherwise Guimard experimented just as much as Horta. He did so, for example, at the Coilliot House, in 1898 with the double façade of la Bluette and its beautiful harmony, in 1899 at the Castel Henriette and in 1905 at the Castel d’Orgeval, a radical expression of an asymmetric 'free plan', twenty-five years before Le Corbusier’s doctrine. Symmetry, by the way, is not forbidden: in the beautiful hôtel Nozal, from 1905, he again uses the rational layout with a rectangular floor plan, as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc advocated.
Innovations in the field of structure are not lacking either, as seen in the remarkable Humbert-de-Romans concert hall from 1901, where an intricate construction disrupts the sound waves, resulting in perfect acoustics, or as in the Hôtel Guimard from 1909, where load-bearing exterior walls were unnecessary due to the small dimensions of the plot, thus enabling a free interior layout, with each floor different.

Guimard designed the famous entrances to the Paris Metro, modular constructions in which the principle of 'ornament as part of the structure' as described by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc can be discerned. He repeats that idea, but with less success, in 1907 with a catalog of cast-iron elements intended for building: Fontes Artistiques, Style Guimard.
Just as his architecture as a whole, the designs of his objects essentially arise from the same ideal of continuity of form, which makes it possible to bring all practical functions together in a single object. Examples of this are the Vase des Binelles, dating from 1903, and the line, as seen in the designs of his furniture, with their slender and balanced silhouettes.
His style was clearly derived from the plant world, yet it remains abstract. Wild frames and busy swirls cover both stone and wood. Guimard also created abstract compositions in two dimensions, which were executed in stained glass: hôtel Mezzara from 1903, in ceramic panels: maison Coilliot from 1898, in wrought iron: Castel Henriette from 1899, on wallpaper: Castel Béranger from 1898, and on canvas: hôtel Guimard from 1909.
The world turned away from Guimard despite the multitude of his artistic innovations in various directions. As a worthy representative of Art Nouveau, he himself was a victim of the contradictions inherent in the ideals of the movement. The majority of his work was also too expensive for most people. Almost no one knew that he had died in 1942 in New York, where, fearing the war, he had moved with his wife, who was Jewish.

When Édouard Empain won the concession for the construction of the Paris Metro, he entrusted the commission to design the entrances, the bouches de métro, to Guimard, who, however, was an adept of Art Nouveau.
Empain supported him in his designs against public opinion. The subway entrances were undervalued for half a century, until public opinion about them changed and Guimard was recognized. By the 1960s many of them had already disappeared, but about sixty were still left, protected as monuments. People began to realize that they deserved a permanent place in Paris.

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