Hector Guimard - A Flashing Glory

A Flashing Glory

The Castel Béranger made Guimard famous and he soon had many commissions. He continued working in the Art Nouveau style, especially devoted to its ideal of harmony and continuity, which caused him to design the interior decoration of his buildings as well. This culminated during 1909 with the Hotel Guimard (his wedding present to his rich American wife) where ovoid rooms contain 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 divides sound waves resulting in perfect acoustics, 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).