Art Deco. Victoria Charles

Pacquet, are made of reinforced concrete, as are the arcs of the departure hall of Biarritz railway station by Dervaux, the cupola of the Boucherie Economique by Alfred Agache, the large roofs of the Galleries Lafayette by Chanut, and the pillars and the vaults of the Church of Saint-Dominique by Gaudibert. Savage used it for the framework of his house with tiered steps from the rue de Vavin and in a building on the Boulevard Raspail; Boileau, in the two basements of new the appendix of Le Bon Marché; Danis, in the framework and the staircase of the Pasteur museum in Strasbourg; Bonnemaison, in his rental properties. In the Church of Saint-Louis in Vincennes, Droz and Marrast combined it with grinding stone and brick. Inside the Church of Saint-Leon in Paris, Leon Brunet adorned it with beautifully laid out bricks. At the very moment when the Exhibition opened, Deneux started to produce the amazing framework of Rheims Cathedral consisting of 17,800 elements moulded on-site, then assembled, put up, and fitted together without the help of bolts or metal parts.

      Claude Beelman, Eastern Columbia Building, 1930.

      Clad in glazed turquoise terracotta tiles and copper panels. Los Angeles.

      As for the works of Auguste and Gustave Perret – the house of the rue Franklin (1902), the garage of the rue de Ponthieu (1905), the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1911–1913), the Church of Notre-Dame du Raincy, the Sainte Chapelle made of reinforced concrete (1922–1923), the tower of the Exhibition of Grenoble (1925) – all of these were built after considering the behaviour of this new material. As Paul Jamot wrote, these buildings attest “that a building which is governed solely by the systematic use of reinforced concrete, with the greatest possible savings of material and labour, [can] be beautiful in itself and, in spite of the absence of any superfluous ornament, be a work of art”. Which forms are thus born most naturally from reinforced concrete? Simple and large ones. As it lends itself to ample vaults, it especially restores to honour the horizontal line. The section of pillars gives it an austere elegance. Bases are no longer necessary as the column sticks straight out of the ground. No more capitals, as the beam and column are made from the same material. The capital, useful in the construction of foundations in order to distribute the weight of the architrave or the lintel amongst the supporting columns, became superfluous in a monolithic system. On the façades, no more horizontal projections except those of some rectangular canopies and sometimes, in order to finish the wall, the hem of a narrow frieze to underlines a distinct shadow.

      Pierre Patout, Hôtel d’un Collectionneur, at the 1925 Paris Exhibition, with its frieze La Danse, by Joseph Bernard, above the porch.

      The walls are nothing but large empty surfaces. However, the reinforced concrete is well-suited for coatings. The marble panels can be fixed more firmly to it than to brick. It admits encrusted stoneware tiles, mosaics which are composed in advance at the base of the wall, stuck together with cement, the reliefs taking shape in the moulds. It offers a vast field of possibilities for the fresco. But it is by its sparse appearance, its blunt edges, by the harmony of the large areas exposed, or those hidden from the light that its most fervent supporters intend to stir our emotions. At most it is polished, in order to soften the roughness of it, or the colour is varied by ochre, grey, blue, pink, or green plastering, which seems to be a part of it. Reinforced concrete, a combination of materials, was already widely used in many countries across the globe. The Exhibition comprised, in the foreign as well as in the French section, a presentation of models, drawings and photographs of recently built works or works in the process of being built; however, its display was limited. The buildings erected for the Exhibition itself account for the greater part of Class I. To what extent does this architectural framework, where decorative arts represented real life as closely as possible, reflect contemporary architecture? There was no revelation comparable with those built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, works like the Eiffel Tower and the Gallerie des Machines (Machinery Hall). However, there were many examples of intelligence, knowledge, ingenuity, talent, a serious understanding of the art of building, a deep sensitivity, and a sober taste, which revealed a progression of trends over the previous twenty or twenty-five years. To judge these buildings equitably, it is initially necessary to take into account the conditions imposed.

      Panoramic view of the 1925 Paris Exhibition, photograph taken facing the Alexandre III bridge, 1925.

      Postcard. Private collection.

      Robert Mallet-Stevens, Tourist information pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exhibition.

      Ink and watercolour on paper.

      Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.

      A house of more than one storey does not lend itself easily to the flow of the crowd. A pavilion anticipates it: hence a certain width of doors and passages, and an increased number of buildings (without ceasing to be accessible), yet keeping some of the mystery through pricking curiosity as to what lay behind the closed façades. Others, such as the houses of the former Soviet Union, and the factories of Copenhagen, Limoges, the Grand Maison de Blanc department store, and the Diamanteries, attracted the public with their outside windows, similar to shop window-displays. Lastly, others presented various compromises between these two extremes. Particular constraints, such as limiting the architects’ freedom, put their talent to the test. At the entrance of the Esplanade des Invalides, an underground station prohibited the digging of the ground deep below the surface. It is important to note that the architect Pierre Patout managed to balance the pylons of the monumental Porte de la Concorde without the help of foundations, whereas Boileau and Sauvage had to distribute the weight of both of the pavilions of Le Bon Marché and Le Printemps on four of the cast iron columns of the station of Les Invalides.

      Various metals were implemented. The woodwork apparent on the Japanese pavilion contributed to its particular appearance, as with the elegant windows of the pavilion of the Manufacturers of Copenhagen, built with wooden planks, rafters, pine battens, and the Sabot – or clog – maker’s house, a work by Gabriel Guillemonat. Brickwork characterised the typical houses of the north-eastern French towns of Roubaix and Tourcoing, along with those of Denmark and the Netherlands, and lastly those of Italy – to which the brick owed its blond colour. Stonework was represented, with infinite artistic talent, by the model that the School of the Paris employers’ federation of building, cement, and reinforced concrete contractors had carried out and displayed in the “teaching” group, according to the drawings of Pierre Paquet. This model of a pavilion, dedicated to rest in a sea of leisure, was so well studied and carried out stone by stone to such perfection, that it was worth building to scale. In the library, a clad iron ceiling shed a generous light on the books. In the domed vestibule of the pavilion of Nancy, the architects had achieved a decorative effect from the steel elements and connecting rivets. On the lintels of the covered walkway of the Esplanade des Invalides, Charles Plumet left the iron beams exposed, acting as both a structural component and decoration. Plaster naturally played a great part. Maurice Dufrêne deserves credit for acknowledging this material frankly in the shops of the Alexandre III Bridge. In the construction of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Auguste Perret was clearly biased in favour of temporary materials: timber posts supporting a reinforced concrete frame, with a timber frame on the inside, and coated with thick plaster.

      On the whole, reinforced concrete dominated the event. Entire constructions, such as the tourist information pavilion or the rest stop pavilion for automobile drivers owed their lines to it. Others borrowed their entire framework from it, like, for example, the pavilion of the Netherlands whose unexpected lighting would have been impossible to realise without its contribution. Elsewhere, architects had been content with imitations of precarious material, forgetting that reinforced concrete is not necessarily blocky and can assume, on the contrary, a certain elegance. Even if the Exhibition did not help the new concept of construction progress on a technical level, the date is marked in the history of its diffusion. It accustomed the eyes to its bold spans, its simple shapes, and its large cantilever overhangs. It established its recognition.

      Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, Pomone pavilion