Tony Garnier

French architect

• Born: August 13, 1869
• Birthplace: Lyon, France
• Died: January 19, 1948
• Place of death: La Bédoule, France

Garnier gained international distinction during the infancy of grand-scale urban planning for his design of Cité Industrielle, representing the introduction of “functional urbanism” in France, his use of audacious concepts, his exploitation of new structural materials (especially reinforced concrete), and his influence on major architects and urban planners.

Early Life

Considering his eventual status as a great French and international architect, and despite a Centre Garnier honoring him in his native Lyons, surprisingly little is known of the first twenty years of the life of Tony Garnier (gahrn-yay). Practically nothing is known of his lineage, even the names of his parents. His father was a silk drawer from whom he derived his initial artistic interests as well as his fierce, lifelong devotion to the Lyonnais and their city. Until the fifteenth century, the city had been a famed religious center but then changed swiftly into a major silk-producing community (silkworms were then cultivated in southeastern France). Destroyed by the Revolution of 1789, Lyons’s silk industry was rejuvenated by the invention of the Jacquard loom, and by Garnier’s day the city’s enterprise had expanded to metallurgical, chemical, clothing, machinery, and later rayon production. For years France’s second city, Lyons battled continually for decentralization from Parisian administrative control and was always a center of socialist strength, though in French politics this constituted a moderate centrist position. Garnier absorbed all of this, lending distinctive qualities to his architectural ambitions and objectives.

Sometime prior to 1884, he lived, and presumably worked, at La Martinière and then entered and spent the next four years at Lyons’s École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, whose traditional perspectives he shortly abandoned. While a student, he won a first prize as well as the distinguished Prix Bellemain. Subsequently moving to Paris, he worked with a well-known contractor, who was earlier closely tied to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s grand transformations of Paris and continuation of these efforts into the 1880’s. Garnier was also associated with the minor Parisian scholar-author Sellier de Gisors. By the end of the 1890’s, Garnier studied at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, again, however excellent, a traditional institution, where nevertheless he won its renowned Prix Chenavard before leaving in 1894. Thus, at age twenty-nine, he was ready to launch his own career.

Life’s Work

Understanding Garnier’s adoration of his native city and its people is the key to comprehending his social and architectural development. Even prior to his departure from Paris, while at the École des Beaux-Arts, he had conceived the fabulous possibilities of a new industrial community. On graduation, however, he undertook the design of a bank, after the standard manner of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, and as a result in 1900 won the esteemed Prix de Rome. Dispatch for further study and work to Rome’s famed Villa de Medici, at the time administered by the French Academy, was his reward, and there he reverted to his earlier designs for his Cité Industrielle. On presentation, his plans were rejected in 1901 by the École des Beaux-Arts on the grounds that, as the school’s paid disciple, he was expected to pursue work in Italy drawn from classical and Renaissance architecture. In fact, for the next three years, he sought to satisfy the expectations of the École des Beaux-Arts, which proved to be restoration plans for the ancient Italian community of Tusculum, while simultaneously continuing plans for his Cité Industrielle on his own initiative. In 1904, he revealed both plans at a Parisian exposition.

Garnier’s plans for a novel community, industrial, to be sure, but projected toward a fresh public and social setting, in principle were not unique. Before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands (more than three thousand in the United States alone) of small utopian communities from New Lanark to Brook Farm were created. However, the post-1850 quantum leap in scientific-technological advances and the concomitant growth of massively populated cities, as well as the proliferation of urbanism generally, evoked new imperatives and challenges. There was the example of the Haussmannization of Paris; of Camillo Sitte’s proposals to redesign Vienna; of a number of German planners eager to reconstruct Wiesbaden, Munich, Mainz, and Darmstadt; and not least Sir Ebenezer Howard’s actual design and creation (in 1898) of the Garden City of Letchworth near London. Such was the context in which Garnier formulated his Cité Industrielle. Howard aside, all continental planning sought the revamping of existing cities, and that was Garnier’s point of departure.

Having imagined his Cité Industrielle by the early 1900’s, Garnier nevertheless waited until 1917 to illuminate his concepts publicly in his two-volume Une Cité Industrielle , with 160 plates, a preface expressing his socialist utopianism, and an explanation of his predilection for concrete materials. His selection of concrete, the new uses of which were the result of French engineering pioneers, influenced him greatly, for as an astute architect he knew of their achievements though he would add his own style to their concepts and materials. Despite alterations in a number of his undertakings, his architectural philosophy changed not at all.

Cité Industrielle was to embrace thirty-five thousand people and was to be located on a plateau in southeastern France, close to a steady watersupply and a then-proposed dam. The plan was comprehensive and of two major parts, each physically separated. Its nucleus consisted of a mixed public and residential zone: administrative facilities, museums, sports and recreational areas, shops, an abattoir, a train station, a primary school, and a tall clock tower. Along an elongated east-west axis were residences, basically concrete cubes surrounded by trees, though these were augmented by four-story concrete apartment buildings whose ability to provide cheap, high-density living had impressed Garnier in Paris. These were linked by arterial roadways to secondary areas such as outlying industrial areas: mines and a silk factory, for example. Northward, a hydroelectric plant was planned. Sequestered by nearby mountains, there was to be a hospital separated from town by a park. Somewhat farther northwest was to be a cemetery. Thus, in fact, nearly all functionally distinct areas were interspersed by greenbelts and bucolic prospects of grazing cattle, farmland, and vineyards. This description is synoptic, for changes occurred as the plan altered over the years.

Meanwhile, there were real commissions (and competitions), from which Garnier earned a living between 1905 and 1914: a Lyonnais dairy, a Parisian low-income housing project, a Marseilles stock exchange, a market and abattoir for Reims, and yet another abattoir for Lyons, several Lyonnais suburban villas, as well as the city’s municipal stadium, and service as chief architect for an international exposition in Lyons. Besides a fresh edition of his original work on Cité Industrielle, he published Les Grands Travaux de la ville de Lyon (1923), a survey including plans and constructions of monuments, hospitals, schools, houses, pasteurization plants, communication facilities, cultural establishments, and a cemetery.

From 1918 until 1939, Garnier completed the États-Unis living quarters, a monument to the war dead, a telephone center, and a textile school, and he entered a competition for a park all in Lyons. His work was not confined to Lyons. Boulogne-Billancourt owed him its town hall; the Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris its Lyons-Saint Étienne Pavilion; and Santo Domingo its projected monument to Christopher Columbus. He was involved in competitions for a hospital in Saint Étienne, a theater in Reims, and an additional park in Lyons. Nearing his seventy-ninth year, he died on January 19, 1948, at La Bédoule, France. Garnier was famous in his own country as one of the first of its architects and honored by numerous architectural societies internationally.

Significance

Although classically trained and well practiced in the execution of this training, Garnier broke new ground in his profession, establishing a new functional architecture urban functionalism which, while begun in France, soon established a novel set of objectives and possibilities for architects elsewhere. In his prime, this thin-faced, clean-cut young Frenchman with keen, piercing eyes never deviated philosophically from his perceptions of his Cité Industrielle, regardless of the projects originally urged on him by his mentors. A socialist, and something of a Utopian to boot, he lived among working people in Lyons and Paris for a time and consecrated his profession to opening fresh aesthetic and visual worlds for them. Cité Industrielle blended a public and cultural center with parks and greenbelts, appropriately melding different spatial prospects. The structural materials that he exploited most brilliantly were concrete, for his simple cubic residences, and, for larger buildings, great cantilevers of reinforced concrete and the liberal use of glass for roofing and other areas to open interiors. While many of his contemporaries were indifferent to architectural aesthetics and their social implications, these aesthetics were evidence of Garnier’s hallmarks, forte, and distinctive genius. Le Corbusier acknowledged his own indebtedness to Garnier, crediting him for his efforts to combine and order both the utilitarian and pliable as well as his choice of volumes of space to match both practical and aesthetic considerations. Above all, Le Corbusier admired Garnier’s development and retention of genuine professional poetic sensibilities and his intimate identification with the culturalist models to which he devoted his career.

Bibliography

Choay, Françoise. The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Marguerite Hugo and George R. Collins. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Choay, a noted French urban authority, places Garnier in context with the emergence of European planning from its premodern to modern forms. There are dozens of excellent plates, including some of Garnier’s Cité Industrielle as well as percipient comments on him. The text is brief but clearly intended for scholars and general readers. A basic, useful review, with excellent endnotes, a useful select bibliography, and a second index.

Collins, Peter. Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture. 2d ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Since Garnier’s chosen structural material was concrete in various forms, this authoritative and readable work puts Garnier’s (among others’) work in proper setting, tracing the controversies, and then the growing confidence in the utility of concrete. Extremely useful for those students or novitiate scholars interested in the development of new structural materials. Includes some notes, a select bibliography, and an adequate index.

Conrads, Ulrich, and Hans G. Sperlich. The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times. Translated by Christine C. Collins and George R. Collins. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. A survey of fine quality that deals with the origins of modern planning, Garnier’s included. Very readable and authoritative. Includes useful notes, some plates, a select bibliography, and a workable index.

Veronesi, Guilia. “A Tribute to Tony Garnier.” Architectural Review 103 (May, 1948): 224. This brief commentary is readable and authoritative, by a Garnier specialist.

Whittick, Arnold. European Architecture in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. London: Unwin, 1963. A fine, authoritative survey, readable but meant for those with some course work or reading in architecture. Detailed with photos and plates, good notes, a good bibliography, and an index.

Wiebenson, Dora. Tony Garnier: The Cité Industrielle. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Brief, but an authoritative study of Garnier’s work. Intended for general readers, the study is graced with scores of superb plates and drawings of Garnier’s work in development. There are extremely informative appendixes and an excellent comparative chronology that juxtaposes Garnier’s work with the lengthy history of “planning” and advances in social thought and technology. Includes a bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Utopian Aspects of Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 19 (March, 1962): 16-24. An authoritative work written by a leading English-language Garnier specialist. This article concentrates more on Garnier’s philosophical premises than on the specific character of his discrete plans and projects. Eminently readable. There are some notes and bibliographical allusions.