How Art Nouveau architect Héctor Guimard created scandalous metro entrances that became masterpieces

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

His creations were called blasphemous and magnificent, destroyed and glorified, a wave of orders from admiring rich people side by side with fierce screams from representatives of the church …

Hector Germain Guimard was born in Lyon, but when the young man was fifteen, the family moved to Paris. There he began his studies at the National School of Decorative Arts, continued at the famous Paris School of Fine Arts and, at the age of twenty, received his first commission - he was to design a Parisian cafe. Guimard's career began early. In his youth, he was fond of neo-Gothic, however, after visiting Brussels and seeing the work of the architect Victor Horta, he fell in love with the quirky Art Nouveau style. On the way to France, Guimard repeated the words of Horta: "… take not a flower, but its stem" - and soon reworked all his current projects in the spirit of curvilinear modernity. Plastic lines that look like shoots, graceful weaves, swirls, bends and waves … In sketches since then, the architect has added the words “Guimard style” to his graceful monogram. And it was not the deplorable pride of a successful artist - Guimard really became the herald of Art Nouveau in France.

The first famous building of Guimard was the Castel Beranger multi-storey apartment building. The conservative part of the Parisian public immediately dubbed this building simply a "madhouse". Guimard provided the entrance to the building with asymmetrical wrought-iron gates, where there was not a single repeating element. He was, in fact, the first who began to design utilitarian constructions without rhythmic ornaments, as a self-valuable work of art with free composition. Even in his early buildings, Guimard boldly combined dissimilar elements - brick and natural stone, forging and sculpture, turning the facades into a kind of musical compositions.

The architect denied the classical symmetry of the facades - and indeed the usual state of affairs in construction. For example, he could arrange windows not on the same line and not even in a strict rhythm, he promoted the idea of a free, not marked facade. At the same time, he perfectly knew how to fit his buildings into a specific Parisian urban environment, "squeeze" between historical buildings so that the building did not lose its attractiveness, and the street became brighter and more harmonious. Guimard also made sure that the interior space of the building was light, cozy and comfortable. Guimard's favorite material was metal, which made it possible to embody the most fantastic ideas. His projects were fantasy and aesthetically sophisticated, but he was interested in new technologies and thought a lot about how to improve the industry. He developed the idea of industrial standardization and also proposed one of the first collections of furniture for mass production.

Héctor Guimard became one of the leading architects in France at the beginning of the 20th century. He built villas and mansions, dwelling houses and cafes, designed metal gratings using the casting technique, decorations, furniture with his favorite plant images. In 1895, the municipality of Paris announced a competition for the creation of the entrances of the metro stations under construction. The main prize was awarded to an architect by the name of Dere. Guimard's project seemed too fantastic to many, but … The President of the Administrative Committee of the Metro, the rich man Adrian Benard, was a great admirer of Guimard and helped to ensure that the order passed to his favorite. Guimard proposed bold and sophisticated solutions based on natural forms - buds, peacock tails, stems of plants … Frosted glass and greenish aged bronze made the arches of the entrances seem to be ancient, adapted them to the appearance of Paris in those years. And at the same time, they looked like jewelry created not for a beautiful woman, but for a great city.

Guimard's ideas met not only enthusiasm, but also fierce criticism. Church workers called the architect's creations "abomination", "blasphemy" and, for some reason, "debauchery." However, over the course of five years, Guimard, despite all these insults, created the entrances for more than sixty Paris Metro stations. True, many of them were dismantled during the First and Second World War, and when the world recovered from these disasters, these metal masterpieces, preserved in the warehouses of the Paris Department of Transport, "dispersed" all over the world, including Russia.

In 1909, Hector Guimard married the artist Adeline Oppenheim, the daughter of an American financier, and presented his wife with a luxurious gift. He designed the famous Hotel Guimard, where he developed not only the image of the building itself, but also the interior down to the smallest detail. The Hotel Guimard was also one of the first buildings to have an elevator - before that, the first elevator models were used only in high-rise buildings.

Salvador Dali called Guimard's creations a symbol of spiritual fortitude - in the days when spiritual fortitude was required by the architect himself. Guimard was not an easy man, he often did not find support and funding. In his mature years, when the art nouveau style had already become boring to the public, he was practically left without orders - the brilliant days of success and glory have passed. In the late 1930s, a terrible shadow of German fascism hung over Europe. And if many still tried to close their eyes to this threat, to convince themselves that they were not concerned outside Germany, Guimard could not remain blind and indifferent - his wife was Jewish. In 1938, the Guimard couple moved to the United States. The architect was no longer young, no one knew him in the USA. After four difficult years, he passed away at the Adams Hotel in New York. In his native France, they learned about this only after the war. As well as the fact that some of Guimard's buildings are irretrievably lost …

Hector Guimard's widow handed over her husband's works - preserved pieces of furniture, jewelry, sketches - to several French museums. After years of criticism, misunderstandings and threats of demolition, the entrances to the Paris metro were declared a national treasure.