In terms of their phenomenal size and scale, in the use of iron, glass, or concrete for their construction, or in the novelty of their form, many buildings of the 19th century in Paris established an outstanding tradition of architectural innovation in the city that was influential in the development of modern architecture all over the world. Architects such as Anatole de Baudot, Henri Labrouste, and Louis-Auguste Boileau were at the forefront in the use of new materials, and engineers such as Gustave Eiffel and Victor Contamin designed structures of unprecedented height and span for the international exhibition of 1889.

From the beginning of the 20th century to its end, no decade (other than the period 1940–50, of World War II and its aftermath) in Paris passed without seeing the building of major landmarks in the progress of architectural design.

One of the most densely populated cities in Europe, roughly circular and bisected from east to west by the Seine River, central Paris is today encircled by the périphérique, the eight-lane motorway within which live some 1.6 million people in an area of great historical importance, containing major Roman remains, great medieval buildings, and narrow medieval streets traversed by wide, 19th-century boulevards. The whole city is dominated by large-scale 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century squares, gardens, palaces, and public buildings. It is therefore not surprising that refurbishment is one of the main 20th- century themes; re-use is another, and yet another has been the relocation of museums, libraries, and administrative offices in new buildings. New housing is a constant focus of activity.

The city began the century with a huge international exhibition for which many temporary and some permanent buildings were erected. Two large exhibition halls, built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, were the Grand Palais by Henri-AdolpheAuguste Deglane, Louis-Albert Louvet, and Albert Thomas and the Petit Palais by Charles Girault, both still standing in what is now the Avenue Winston-Churchill. The Grand Palais as well as the adjacent Pont Alexandre III (the first bridge to cross the Seine in one span, designed by the engineers Résal and Alby) are, like the Petit Palais, flamboyant in their neobaroque style, but they are also openly expressive of the iron structure to which they owe their form.

An antihistoricist movement had already by then made its mark in Paris and was encouraged by the opening of Samuel Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in the rue de Provence in 1895.

Using exposed ironwork, reinforced concrete, or masonry, buildings in the short-lived style known as Art Nouveau are remarkable for their curved and undulating lines; their organic, floral decoration; and their studied avoidance of motifs associated with the past. Important Art Nouveau buildings in Paris by Hector Guimard include the apartment building Castel Béranger (1894–98) and the entrances to many Métro underground railway stations (1899–1903). Some of these designs were still being carried out as late as 1914. For his own house in the avenue Mozart (1909–12) and the synagogue in the rue Pavée (1913), Guimard remained faithful to the Art Nouveau after it had fallen from general favor. The Samaritaine department store (1905) by Franz Jourdain was characteristic of the movement, in that exposed structural ironwork is combined with lavish polychrome faience decoration.

At the same time, significant buildings were being designed with little or no decoration at all. Following the pioneering systems of reinforced concrete devised by Hennebique, Coignet, and Considère, the brothers Auguste and Gustave Perret were the first architects to make extensive use of this constructional technique in all their buildings. The apartment house at 22 rue Franklin (1902–03), the garage in the rue Pontieu (1905–06, demolished ca. 1969), the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1910–13), and the church of Nôtre Dame, Le Raincy (1922–23), are well-known examples of buildings revealing their structure and with minimal or no decorative features. Henri Sauvage designed two influential apartment houses: the Maison a Gradins in the rue Vavin (1911–12) and the Immeuble d’appartements (1924–26) in the rue des Amiraux explore the setting back of each successive floor, with full-length balconies and the use of whitetiled facades to bring light to the apartments and to the street.

An elegant reinforced-concrete structure was designed for a cardboard factory at Lancey near Paris by the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart (1872–1940), and a pair of spectacular 300-meter-long aircraft hangars (destroyed 1939–45) at Orly in the form of 62.50-meter-high parabolic arches were commissioned by the French government in 1916 from Eugène Freysinnet (1879–1962).

The work of such architects and engineers as Perret, Maillart, and Freysinnet were among the sources of inspiration to the Swiss-born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), who settled in Paris in 1917 and who built his first Parisian building, the Villa Ker-Ka-Re (1922–23), at Vaucresson in the western suburbs. This house, with its asymmetrical facade, had smooth, white, cement-rendered walls; horizontal and vertical strips of windows; and a flat roof. Its design reflected the close interest the artist had in Cubist painting. A studio house in the avenue Reille for the painter Amédée Ozenfant was completed in 1924. Le Corbusier was subsequently to design a number of celebrated and influential buildings in and near Paris, including the Maison Roche/Jeanneret (square du Docteur Blanche, 1923–24), the Maison Planeix (boulevard Masséna, 1924–28), the suburban villa Stein/de Monzie (Les Terrasses, 1926–28) at Garches, and the dazzling Villa Savoye (Les Heures Claires, 1928–29) at nearby Poissy.

Other important Parisian houses of this period characterized by their pure, white, cubic forms were the Maison Tzara (1925–27) by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos (although the ground floor is of coursed rubble), the Villa Seurat (1924–26), and the Maison Guggenbuhl (1927) by André Lurçat and the group known as the Cité Mallet-Stevens (1926–27) by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The unique Maison de Verre (1929–31) by Pierre Chareau has, by contrast, a sheer wall of glass as its facade.

In 1937 the Exposition des Arts et Techniques was the occasion for the erection of a number of monumental public buildings that continue to impose on the modern appearance of Paris: the Palais de Chaillot (Place du Trocadéro, by Carlus, Boileau, and Azéma) and the twin Musées d’Art Moderne (Palais de Tokyo, by Dondel, Aubert, Viard, and Dastugue) nearby on the Avenue de New York. Both are stone-clad reinforced- concrete structures epitomizing the stripped neoclassicism in vogue in the more conservative circles at the period. Meanwhile, Le Corbusier continued to contribute buildings of fundamental importance to the Modern movement in architecture: the Asile Flottant (1929), a converted barge moored on the Quai d’Austerlitz to shelter vagrants, and the Cité de Refuge de l’Armée du Salut (1929–33) were commissioned by the Salvation Army. The Swiss Pavilion (1932) at the Cité Internationale of the Cité Universitaire is a hostel for Swiss students. This building clearly differentiates its component parts, with its ground-hugging curved lobby, its staircase tower, and its long, rectangular, curtain-walled dormitory slab raised on in situ cast stilts, or pilotis. In many respects, it established themes that were to be developed by Le Corbusier and countless other architects for the rest of the century.

During World War II and the Occupation, there was no significant architectural activity, and the economy took until the 1950s to recover sufficiently for serious new buildings to be financed. Le Corbusier designed the twin Maisons Jaoul (1952–56) in Neuilly, which, although of low cost and very modest in scale, were widely influential on many architects: their use of simple, shuttered concrete forms and segmental vaults resting on exposed brickwork walls heralded a new roughness and primitivism. In 1959 Le Corbusier, with Lucio Costa, designed a new pavilion for Brazilian students at the Cité Universitaire. Only 200 meters from the Swiss Pavilion and, like it, essentially consisting of a dormitory slab raised on pilotis, straddling the ground-floor communal spaces, the Brazilian Pavilion is by contrast rough, heavy, and vigorous in its concrete forms. An overall grid of brise-soleil projecting balconies and screens extends over the facade.

The Headquarters of UNESCO (1953–58) was one of the first large-scale undertakings of the period, an eight-story building, in plan a curved Y shape, by Marcel Breuer (United States), Bernard Zehrfuss (France), and Pier Luigi Nervi (Italy). It was designed to respect the form of the Place Fontenoy, behind the École Militaire, and to fit in with one of the most complex and important axial sequences of the city. A splendid program of commissions from leading artists of many nationalities was inaugurated to embellish the interior and its exterior site.

One of the largest buildings of the complex around the Place de la Défense, which closes the axis of the avenue de la Grande Armée to the west of the Etoile, was the CNIT, Palais des Expositions (1957–58), by Camelot, de Mailly, Zehrfuss, and Esquillan. Triangular in plan and covered with a continuous fluted concrete-shell roof rising from three points on the ground, the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi was the engineer, and the veteran pioneer of metal cladding, Jean Prouvé, designed the vast elliptical curtain walls of glass and steel on each side.

With the hostility felt by General de Gaulle and his government to the Montparnasse Tower block, which rose above the southern skyline of Paris in the 1960s, skyscrapers were banned from the central area, and the Défense, which is beyond the périphérique, was the first area to develop a cluster of tall buildings.

A restrained but powerful, moving, and effective memorial to those who died in concentration camps is the Memorial de la Déportation (1961–62) by Henri Pingusson It is situated at the tip of the Ile de la Cité. The visitor descends a steep and narrow staircase to a small open courtyard from which nothing can be seen but the sky above and the parting of the waters of the river through a low metal grille ahead. An underground space behind has the names of the camps and a tunnel of thousands of tiny lights stretching as far as the eye can see.

With the establishment of the cultural Centre Georges Pompidou, or Beaubourg, the era of “Grands Projets” began for Paris, in which successive presidents of France committed the state to an astonishing series of monumental additions to the city. The design of a London-based Anglo-Italian architectural practice, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Pompidou Center (1970–77) is at once a realization of the ideas current in the Archigram Group in London during the 1960s and a worthy successor to the Parisian tradition of novel metal-and-glass buildings. Alongside a new square, or piazza, under which there is a parking lot, rises the rectangular steel-framed block, with open floors internally—all clear of any vertical structural supports. All services, heating, ventilation, electricity, water, and drainage are on the exterior, making an until-then-unprecedented exposure of all the technology required in a modern public building. Close by, IRCAM (1977), an institute for interdisciplinary research into music, was designed by Piano and Rogers as a network of spaces under the new Place Igor Stravinsky; in 1989, Renzo Piano added to it a 25-meter tower aboveground. Since 1970 vast areas have been developed underground in Paris. The remarkable 19th-century iron-and-glass market pavilions of the Halles Centrales (by Victor Baltard and Felix Callet in 1869) were demolished during the 1970s, and in their place, following gigantic excavations, an underground shopping area, the Forum, was designed by Penchreac’h and Manoilesco. The subterranean complex also contains a busy new RER/Métro transport interchange and, 20 meters down, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a vidéothèque (1985) by Paul Chemetov.

Two outstanding new museums were created in the mid-1980s, both inserted into old buildings. One, the Musée d’Orsay (1986), in the disused Gare d’Orsay (1900, Victor Laloux), was designed by the Italian architect Gae Aulenti with monumental but open galleries and towers under the vault of the giant railway station nave. The Musée Picasso (1985) was, by contrast, a transformation by Roland Simounet of a 17th-century house in the Marais district, the Hotel Salé (Hotel Aubert de Fontenay). Simounet inserted into the ancient fabric of the building a brilliant sequence of well-lit spaces and volumes while Arrondissement.

The 1990 project of the Ministère de la Poste to build 1500 dwellings on its sites has already resulted in a number of attractive and imaginative new buildings, such as those in the Place Jeanne d’Arc (Dubus and Richez) or in the rue Oberkampf (1993, Borel).

A constant program of restoration, new housing, new facilities, and refurbished street furniture has improved the city in almost every quarter, a good example being the enormous program of improvements made to the avenue de l’Italie during 1999–2000.

The municipality of Paris set up enlightened agencies such as the RIVP (Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris) and the designation of areas of the city as ZACs (Zones d’Aménagement Concertées, such as those at Reuilly, 1987–97, or Bercy, 1993–36) as key elements of the continuing restructuring, repair, and embellishment of the urban fabric of this great city.

ALAN WINDSOR

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

ARCHITECTS: FRANCE

INTERNAL LINKS

ART NOUVEAU; BREUER, MARCEL; HORTA, VICTOR; PEI, I.M.

FUTHER READING

Campbell, Barbara-Ann, Paris: A Guide to Recent Architecture, London: Ellipsis and Cologne: Könemann, 1999

Collins, Peter, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture: A Study of Auguste Perret and His Precursors, London: Faber and Faber, and New York: Horizon Press, 1959

De Witt, Dennis J. and Elizabeth R.De Witt, Modern Architecture in Europe: A Guide to Buildings since the Industrial Revolution, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, and New York: Dutton, 1987

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Architecture, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1958; 4th edition, London and New York: Penguin, 1977; reprinted, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1987

Hoyet, Jean-Michel, L’Architecture Contemporaine a Paris; Contemporary Architecture in Paris (bilingual French-English edition), translated by Bernard Wooding, Paris: Techniques and Architecture, 1994

Middleton, Robin and David Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, 2 vols., New York: Abrams and London: Academy Editions, 1980

Whittick, Arnold, European Architecture in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols., London: Lockwood, 1950; New York: Philosophical Library, 1950

Paris Architecture 1900-2000

Paris 1900 architecture and design

Paris a century of change, 1878-1978

Vivre à Paris: architectures d'aujourd'hui