Hector Guimard (1867–1942) was a French architect and designer prominent for his Art Nouveau work. Born in Lyon, he was a disciple of Viollet-le-Duc. Meeting Victor Horta in Brussels in 1895, where he saw the curving plant-like lines of the Hôtel Tassel, changed his style. Between 1890 and 1930 he built some 50 buildings, but Art Nouveau fell out of fashion in the 1910s, and by the 1960s most of his work had been demolished; his reputation revived in that decade. His wife was Jewish, and fearing war they settled in New York in 1938, where he died.
Read moreShow less
Castel Béranger (1898) was the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris and was chosen in the city's façade competition as one of the best new façades. Between 1900 and 1913 he designed the first generation of the Paris Metro Entrances (1900), 141 in all, in cast iron and glass painted green to look like weathered brass. The Hôtel Guimard (1912) on the Avenue Mozart was built from 1909 as his home and studio, with a studio for his wife, the painter Adeline Oppenheim Guimard.
