Hector Guimard

Early life

Guimard was born in Lyon. Like many other French nineteenth-century architects, he attended the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris from 1882 to 1885, where he became acquainted with the theories of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. These rationalist ideas provided the basis for his idiosyncratic form of Art Nouveau. In 1884 he was awarded three bronze and two silver medals at the school for his work. In 1885 he received awards in all of the competitions at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs including four bronze medallions, five silver, and the school's Grande Prix d'Architecture.

In 1885 Guimard began his studies at the École Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he was admitted to the first year at École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1888. Later, in 1890, he was awarded a silver metal for "modelled ornament" at Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

In 1891 Guimard became an Assistant professor in descriptive geometry, shadow, and perspective drawings of the girls' section at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He was named a professor the following year in 1892 of the girls' section and was also named a professor of perspective in 1894. He remained there until 1900.

In 1893 he designed the lettering and street numbers for the Hotel Villa de la Réunion at 142 avenue de Versailles, Paris, which were produced for him by the ceramicist Emile Muller. The following year Guimard visited the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta, and the latters works was to become a profound inspiration.

His first solo commission and breakthrough came in 1894, when he designed Castel Béranger at 14, rue La Fontaine, Paris, for Mme. Fournier. Carried out over four years, he persuaded his client to abandon a more restrained design and replace it with an overt embracement of the art of the curvilinear. In a single commission Guimard demonstrated how architecture and the industrial arts could be united in a single building to create a unified, modern scheme. See and.

A flashing glory

The Castel Béranger made Guimard famous and he soon had many commissions. He continued to develop his own form of Art Nouveau, especially devoted to the ideal of harmony and continuity, which caused him to design the interior furnishings and decoration of his buildings as well. This approach culminated between 1909 and 1912 when he created his own home, Hotel Guimard (his wedding present to his rich American wife) where ovoid rooms contained 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 made noteworthy experiments in space and volume. Some of these include the Coilliot House and its disconcerting double-frontage (1898), La Bluette and its beautiful volumetric harmony (1898), and especially the Castel Henriette (1899) and the Castel d’Orgeval (1905), radical demonstrations of a vigorous and asymmetrical "free plan", twenty-five years before the theories of Le Corbusier. But other buildings of his, like the splendid Nozal Hotel, (1905), employ a rational, symmetrical, square-based style like that of Viollet-le-Duc.

Guimard also employed some structural innovations, as in the extraordinary concert hall Humbert-de-Romans (1901), where a complex frame divided sound waves resulted in perfect acoustics (built 1898 and sadly demolished in 1905), 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. His greatest success here – in spite of some scandals – was his famous entrances to the Paris Metro, based on the ornamented structures of Viollet-le-Duc. 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.

His inimitable stylistic vocabulary suggests plants and organic matter, while remaining abstract. Flexible mouldings and a sense of movement are found in stone as well as wood carvings. Guimard created abstract two-dimensional patterns that were used for 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

Despite Guimard's innovations and talent, the press grew tired of him—not so much with his work, but his personality. His relationship with the clergyman who commissioned him to build the Humbert de Romans Concert Hall (arguably the most complete expression of his Art Nouveau style) became acrimonious by the time of its completion in 1901, and the clergyman left France. Within five years the magnificent concert venue was demolished; it is now only known by photographs and articles from art journals. A large number of his Paris Métro station entrances, including all of the large pavilions such as the one at Bastille, were demolished. The only full, roofed enclosures left are the original one at Porte Dauphine and the reconstructed ones at Abbesses and Châtelet, although many of the fenced entrances remain or have been rebuilt. Guimard died, aged 75, in New York City, USA.

Guimard's work is itself victim of inherent contradictions of the ideals of the Art Nouveau style: his best creations remained unaffordable to the general public, and his attempts at standardization of materials, parts, and measures never could keep pace with his stylistic changes. Guimard's fear of war and the Nazi Party's anti-Semitism (his wife was Jewish) forced him into exile in 1938, and he was largely forgotten when he died in New York, at the Adams Hotel, 80th Street and Fifth Avenue on 20 May 1942. He is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in the hamlet of Hawthorne, New York, about 25 miles north of New York City.

The rediscovery

Many of Guimard's buildings were destroyed after his death, but he started to be rediscovered during the 1960s. Now, scholars have reconstructed his career and he has been the subject of much research. Still, one hundred years after what Le Corbusier termed the "magnificent gesture" of Art Nouveau, most of Guimard's buildings remain inaccessible to the public, and he has no museum devoted to him. However, original architectural drawings by Guimard are stored in the Dept. of Drawings & Archives at Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City.

Projects