68 Facts About Hector Guimard

Hector Guimard was a French architect and designer, and a prominent figure of the Art Nouveau style.

Hector Guimard achieved early fame with his design for the Castel Beranger, the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris, which was selected in an 1899 competition as one of the best new building facades in the city.

Hector Guimard is best known for the glass and iron edicules or canopies, with ornamental Art Nouveau curves, which he designed to cover the entrances of the first stations of the Paris Metro.

Between 1890 and 1930, Guimard designed and built some fifty buildings, in addition to one hundred and forty-one subway entrances for Paris Metro, as well as numerous pieces of furniture and other decorative works.

Hector Guimard's father, Germain-Rene Guimard, was an orthopedist, and his mother, Marie-Francoise Bailly, was a linen maid.

Hector Guimard's father became a gymnastics teacher at the Lycee Michelet in Vanves in 1878, and the following year Hector began to study at the Lycee.

Hector Guimard received his diploma on 17 March 1887, and promptly enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied architecture.

Hector Guimard received honorable mention in several architectural competitions, and showed his paintings at the Paris Salon des Artistes in 1890, and in 1892 competed, without success, in the competition for the Prix de Rome.

Hector Guimard showed his work at the Paris Salons of April 1894 and 1895, which earned him a prize of a funded voyage first to England and Scotland, and then, in the summer of 1895, to the Netherlands and Belgium.

Hector Guimard arranged for Horta to have an exhibition of his designs at the January 1896 Paris Salon, and Hector Guimard's own style and career began to change.

The earliest constructed work of Hector Guimard was the cafe-restaurant Au Grand Neptune, located on the Quai Auteuil in Paris at the edge of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889.

Hector Guimard constructed another picturesque structure for the Exposition, the Pavilion of Electricity, a showcase for the work of electrical engineer Ferdinand de Boyeres.

Hector Guimard earned his living primarily from his teaching at the School of Decorative Arts.

Hector Guimard's first recognized major work was the Castel Beranger in Paris, an apartment building with thirty-six units constructed between 1895 and 1898, when the architect was just thirty years old.

Hector Guimard persuaded his client to abandon a more restrained design and replace it with a new design in a more modern style, similar to that of Horta's Hotel Tassel, which he had visited in the summer of 1895.

Hector Guimard put together an extraordinary number of stylistic effects and theatrical elements on the facade and in the interior, using cast iron, glass and ceramics for decoration.

Hector Guimard designed every detail, including the wallpaper, rain spouts and door handles, and added adding highly modern new features including a telephone booth in the lobby.

Hector Guimard had his own apartment and office in the building.

Hector Guimard organized conferences and press articles, set up an exhibition of his drawings in the salons of Le Figaro, and wrote a monograph on the building.

Hector Guimard was summoned back and redesigned the house, adding new balconies and terrace.

In 1898 Hector Guimard embarked upon another ambitious project, the construction of a concert hall, the Salle Humbert-de-Romans, located at 60 Rue Saint Didier.

Hector Guimard made an ambitious and non-traditional plan using soaring levels of iron and glass, inspired by an early idea of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc.

Time was short, and Hector Guimard presented sketches of his own idea for entrances made of iron and glass, which would be quicker and simpler to manufacture.

Hector Guimard was given the commission on 12 January 1900, just a few months before the opening of the system.

Hector Guimard designed a simpler version, without a roof, with railings or balustrades of ornamental green-painted iron escutcheons and two high pylons with lamps and a 'Metropolitain' sign.

The dispute was ended in 1903 with an agreement by which Hector Guimard received payment, but gave up his models and manufacturing rights.

Hector Guimard's works shown at the 1903 Paris Exposition of residential architecture did not attract the attention of the Castel Beranger and other earlier work.

Hector Guimard was supported largely by one wealthy client, Leon Nozal, and his friends.

The most important work of this period is the Hotel Hector Guimard, built in 1909 at 122 Avenue Mozart in Paris, ten years after his first success with the Hotel Beranger.

The land was purchased three months after the marriage, and in June 1910 Hector Guimard was able to move the offices of his agency into the ground floor.

Hector Guimard saved interior space by installing an inclined elevator rather than a stairway on the upper floors.

Hector Guimard left Paris and to reside most of the war in a luxury hotel in Pau and Candes-Saint-Martin, where he wrote essays and pamphlets calling for an end to militarized society, and, more practically, studying ideas standardized housing that could be constructed more quickly and less expensively, anticipating the need to reconstruct housing destroyed in the War.

Hector Guimard received a dozen patents for his new inventions.

Hector Guimard was unable to keep up with the rapid changes in styles and methods, and his firm was finally dissolved in July 1925.

Hector Guimard designed and built a parking garage and several war memorials and funeral monuments.

Hector Guimard continued to receive honors, particularly for his teaching at the Ecole national des arts decoratifs.

Hector Guimard adapted to the new style and proved his originality and attention to the detail.

Hector Guimard made a skilful of different-colored brick and stone to create decorative designs on the facade, and added triangular sculpted windows on the roof level, and, in the interior.

Hector Guimard was a winner again, and was the first Paris architect to enter twice and to win twice.

Hector Guimard's last recorded work was La Guimardiere, an apartment building on Avenue Le Notre, Vaucresson in the Hauts-de-Seine suburb of Paris.

The Hector Guimard Building at Rue Henri-Heine, Paris XVI arrondissement.

Detail of the Hector Guimard Building, showing the entrance, where Art Deco and Art Nouveau elements coexist.

Hector Guimard obtained space in the former orangerie of the Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he deposited models of his buildings and hundreds of designs.

Hector Guimard served as a member of the jury judging architectural works at the 1937 Paris Exposition, where he could hardly miss the monumental pavilion of Nazi Germany and the threat it presented.

Hector Guimard's wife was Jewish, and he was alarmed by the approaching likelihood of war.

Hector Guimard died on 20 May 1942 at the Hotel Adams on Fifth Avenue.

Hector Guimard is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, about 25 miles north of New York City.

Hector Guimard offered the Hotel Guimard as a site for a Guimard Museum first to the French state, then to the City of Paris, but both refused.

Hector Guimard donated a collection of three hundred designs and photographs to the Museum of Decorative Arts.

Hector Guimard's widow died on 26 October 1965 in New York.

However, many original architectural drawings by Hector Guimard were stored in the Dept.

The re-evaluation and rehabilitation of Hector Guimard's reputation began in the late 1960s.

Hector Guimard's reputation was given a major boost in 1970, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a large exhibition of his work, including drawings he had donated himself and one of his Metro Station edicules.

In 1978 all of Hector Guimard's surviving Metro entrances were declared of historic value.

Hector Guimard is honoured in street names in the French towns of Chateauroux, Perpignan, Guilherand-Granges and Cournon-d'Auvergne, and by the rue Hector Guimard in Belleville, Paris.

Hector Guimard apparently did not produce any furniture for the Hotel Beranger, other than a desk and chairs for his own studio there.

Hector Guimard designed furnishings without any particular room in mind, as he did with watercolor designs for the Russian Princess Maria Tenisheva in 1903.

Hector Guimard found a workshop to make his furniture, and began using finer woods, particularly pear wood, with delicate colors.

Hector Guimard simplified he plans, and eliminated the excessive number of arms and shelves.

Much of the success of Hector Guimard came from the small details of his designs, from door handles and balcony railings to type faces, which he crafted with special imagination and care.

Hector Guimard invented his own style of lettering which appeared on his Metro entrances and his building plans.

Hector Guimard insisted on calling his work "Style Guimard", not Art Nouveau, and he was genius at publicizing it.

Hector Guimard wrote numerous articles and gave interviews and lectures on his work, and printed a set of "Style Guimard" postcards with his pictures of his buildings,.

Hector Guimard rejected the dominant academic Beaux-Arts style of there 1880s, calling it "cold receptacle of various past styles in which the original spirit was no longer alive enough to dwell".

Hector Guimard employed some structural innovations, as in the concert hall Humbert-de-Romans, where he created a complex frame to divide sound waves to produce enhanced acoustics, or as in the Hotel Hector Guimard, where the ground was too narrow to have the exterior walls bear any weight, and thus the arrangement of interior spaces differs from one floor to another.

Hector Guimard was a determined advocate of architectural standardization, from mass-producing Metro station edicules and balustrades to the mass production of cast iron pieces and other prefabricated building materials intended for the assembly rows of houses.

Undulating and coagulating forms are found in every material from stone, wood, cast iron, glass, fabric, paper, wrought iron, and ceramic ; Hector Guimard compared it analogously to the flowing of sap running from a tree, referring to the liquid quality found in his work as the "sap of things".

Hector Guimard is inspired by the underlying movements, by the creative process in nature that reveals to us identical formulas through its numerous manifestations.