Auguste Perret

French architect

• Born: February 12, 1874
• Birthplace: Near Brussels, Belgium
• Died: February 25, 1954
• Place of death: Paris, France

Perret’s great contribution was the utilization, refinement, and promotion of reinforced concrete, or ferroconcrete, which he was convinced was the building material of the future.

Early Life

Auguste Perret (oh-guhst peh-ray), the eldest of three brothers, was born near Brussels of French parentage. His father, descended from a long line of master stonemasons, had been a successful building contractor in Paris. His involvement in the communist uprising against the government in 1871 forced him to leave France for Belgium, where he reestablished himself as a contractor. In 1881, however, after a general amnesty, he and his family returned to Paris, where he successfully continued his career as a building contractor, training his sons to do the same.

In 1891, Auguste Perret was enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, the leading architectural school of its time. The training was theoretical, and the curriculum stressed classical designs. Perret was a diligent student, earning a series of first prizes. He always considered the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), known for his restoration work on ancient French monuments, to have been his great inspiration. Viollet-le-Duc not only respected traditional architecture but also stressed the importance of unity between design and execution.

While at the Beaux-Arts, Perret continued to work for his father in construction. He left the school without completing the final project for his diploma. The move was deliberate. By law, a licensed architect could not be a building contractor. Perret wanted to build what he designed. Therefore, for the next sixty years one of France’s leading architects was known simply as a contractor.

At the time Perret was at the Beaux-Arts, François Hennebique patented a process for creating a concrete frame structure reinforced by embedded iron or steel rods. He constructed several buildings in Paris with a reinforced concrete core but with exposed surfaces covered with traditional building materials. Perret recognized both the potentials and faults of the new material; he was determined to improve it and to utilize it honestly as an inexpensive, versatile, and potentially handsome building material.

Life’s Work

Perret’s first major use of reinforced concrete was in 1899 at the municipal casino in St. Malo, where he installed a clear span reinforced concrete beam sixty feet long. The pivotal structure, the one to establish Perret’s reputation as a great architect, was the rue Franklin apartment house in Paris built in 1903, the first to be built completely of reinforced concrete with its basic lines revealed rather than hidden. The site with its limited area would have been unsuitable for conventional building materials. Using more compact and stronger reinforced concrete solved the problem.

Perret designed what appeared to be a conventional, handsome seven-story and penthouse apartment building architecturally in harmony with those it abutted. Technically, the design was revolutionary. All the light for the apartments came from the street side. Since the walls were non-load-bearing because of the reinforced concrete frame, more window space was available. To secure even more lighting, Perret recessed part of the facade as a light well and compensated for the lost space by cantilevering the lateral bay windows of the apartments. The services were in the rear, where light was secured by embedded hexagonal glass bricks. The interior walls too were non-load-bearing and thus could be rearranged at will. The only concession Perret made to conventional architecture was in covering the exposed concrete with colorful faience tiles. The concrete was not impervious to moisture a shortcoming Perret was determined to correct. The tiles, however, followed the building lines.

The elder Perret, who had neither sympathy for nor understanding of reinforced concrete and forced the son to use a subcontractor for the rue Franklin building, died in 1905. The firm now became Perret Brothers: Auguste and his two brothers Gustave and Claude. The same year, the new firm built another concrete frame building, a garage. Then for seventeen years, Perret would not build another, although his firm often constructed skeletal reinforced concrete frames on which a veneer of conventional building material would be placed a process Perret considered dishonest.

In 1913, Perret was involved in a major building project that would enhance his reputation as an innovative builder, for he had to accept with modification a design already accepted. The building was the Théâtre Champs-Élysées in Paris. Again there were difficulties: groundwater and an irregular building site. Perret overcame the former by floating the theater on a concrete pontoon; he overcame the latter by the use of concealed reinforced concrete arches, which enabled him by the process of cantilevering and suspending to construct three separate theaters, each capable of being used independently.

The war years of 1914-1918, while inhibiting conventional architectural design, afforded Perret the opportunity of improving reinforced concrete and demonstrating its versatility. At the great docks constructed in Casablanca, Morocco, his reinforced concrete vaulting was in places less than two inches thick yet incredibly strong. In a clothing factory completed in 1919, Perret created the greatest amount of unobstructed floor space yet known through the use of gigantic freestanding reinforced concrete arches.

By this time, through consultation and experimentation, Perret had succeeded in making reinforced concrete moisture-resistant. He achieved this innovation by vibrating the composition before it had hardened to increase its density. The improved concrete was used to construct in 1922-1923 the church of Notre-Dame at Le Raincy, for many Perret’s greatest masterpiece. Dedicated to French soldiers who had fallen in the Battle of Ourq in World War I, built in record time and with limited funds, the church was made entirely of exposed reinforced concrete. In form, the church followed that of the traditional cathedral, but its execution was unique. A single great barrel vault spanned the nave, which was separated from the side aisles by slender columns added for dramatic effect. The glory of the church was the walls constructed of precast concrete grilles in geometric patterns. Into the openwork Perret had inserted colored glass arranged according to the spectrum. The effect was overwhelmingly magnificent. In the words of one critic, concrete had at last come of age.

The time of the building of Notre-Dame at Le Raincy marked a turning point in Perret’s professional career. His reputation now firmly established, he could devote himself to honest reinforced concrete constructions. The architectural avant-garde ignored him, but businessmen and governmental bureaucrats liked him, seeing him as a dependable architect who never exceeded cost estimates.

Between 1923 and his death in 1954, Perret completed more than seventy projects in addition to numerous plans. Three bear mentioning because they demonstrate advances in Perret’s professional career. The Mobilier National Building of 1934, built to house the costly official furniture and furnishings of the French government, again had to be built on an irregular site and for multiple functions ranging from monumental exhibition halls to domestic quarters for curators. Perret created a harmonious design incorporating features of traditional French architecture. Because of the increased density and strength of the concrete, the unattractive layer of mortar that rises to the surface once concrete is poured could now be removed. Perret executed this innovation through a bushhammering technique, and the concrete looked like traditional dressed stone.

Since the bushhammering revealed the pebble and stone content of the concrete or its aggregate, Perret now sought to improve its appearance. One method involved graduated sizes in the pebbles and stone. Another mixed colored stone chips with a white matrix or cement binder, thus achieving a pointillistic effect. The best examples of his experimentations are to be seen in the composition of the columns of the Museum of Public Works built facing the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Perret’s columns harmonized with those on the splendid eighteenth century buildings. By carefully controlled formwork, Perret also succeeded in achieving beautiful profiling for the building in the form of subtle curves.

Perret’s last major project was the rebuilding of the port city of Le Havre, whose center had been demolished by Allied bombing during World War II. In his design, Perret showed the influence of the great city planners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose ideas Perret had adapted to the twentieth. His plan called for grand avenues connecting principal buildings with the spaces between filled with parks, squares, and streets laid out in grid fashion. He designed both the new city hall and the monumental church of St. Michael.

Official recognition and honors for Perret came late. At the age of seventy-one, he was finally permitted to call himself an architect and was made president of the newly formed Order of Architects. He became a professor at the Beaux-Arts, was elected to the Institute of France, and was appointed officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1948, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects; in 1953, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects. Perret died the following year as he would have wished, in a luxurious apartment in a building he had himself constructed of reinforced concrete.

Significance

Auguste Perret’s professional career as an architect can best be summed up by viewing him essentially as an innovator and compromiser. The innovation was the utilization, refinement, and promotion of reinforced concrete. Through processes such as vibrating, bushhammering, constituting, and profiling, Perret succeeded in making it not only an inexpensive and incredibly strong but also a handsome building material. In a sense, he accomplished in a lifetime for concrete what it had taken countless generations of others to do for stone. As a compromiser, Perret in his designs tried to draw what was useful from the past and adapt it to the present. He viewed much of the work of his architectural contemporaries as unwarranted displays of egotism. He always maintained that the architect was limited by the laws of nature regarding the properties of materials, the vagaries of climate, the rules of optics, and the sense of lines and forms. Ignoring these limitations produced designs that fatigued the eye and were transitory. In the last analysis, what was to be sought was environmental harmony.

Bibliography

Benevolo, Leonardo. History of Modern Architecture. Translated by H. J. Landry. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Benevolo explains how Perret, despite his reputation as a “classical” architect, through subtle refinements and true originality fits into the 1890-1914 avant-garde movement of European architecture.

Bosworth, William Wells. “Perret, the Innovator, a Professional Study.” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 26 (Summer, 1955): 141-148. Bosworth knew Perret well. They were both members of the Institute of France. The article has interesting quotes from various authorities on Perret. Bosworth singles out the Museum of Public Works as Perret’s most significant work and explains why.

Britton, Karla. Auguste Perret. New York: Phaidon, 2001. A study of Perret’s work, illustrated with drawings and photographs from his archives and other sources. Includes an appendix of Perret’s aphorisms and other writings.

Collins, Peter. Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture. 2d ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. The most comprehensive work available in English on Perret. The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with the historic development of the use of concrete; the second with the technological evolution of reinforced concrete or ferroconcrete in the nineteenth century; the third section and principal part of the book deals with the work of Perret. Collins divides Perret’s career into two parts: the formative and the definitive, with 1928 as the dividing line. It was in the latter period that Perret came into his own. Of particular value are the 156 black-and-white photographs of all Perret’s principal works as well as related works and designs of other architects.

Goldfinger, Ernö. “The Work of Auguste Perret.” Architectural Journal 70 (January, 1955): 144-156. Goldfinger knew Perret for nearly a quarter century and had worked in his office. This article is a transcript of a speech Goldfinger delivered to a meeting of the British Architectural Association shortly after Perret’s death. Goldfinger divides Perret’s career into four parts: search for a medium, adventures in tectonic truth, search for a French style, and the final achievement. The comments of some of the members of the association who also knew Perret are interesting as well.

Tafuri, Manfredo, and Francesco Dal Co. Modern Architecture. Translated by Robert Erich Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. The book gives probably the best concise overall account of Perret’s career from the building of the rue Franklin apartment house to the plan for the rebuilding of Le Havre. Of particular interest is the description of French politics that prevented Perret from receiving commissions he deserved.