About Hector Guimard
Hector Guimard (French pronunciation: [ɛktɔʁ ɡimaʁ]; 10 March 1867 – 20 May 1942) was a French architect and designer prominent for his Art Nouveau style designs including Paris Métro entrances. He achieved early fame with his design for the Castel Béranger, the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris, which was selected in an 1899 competition as one of the best new building facades in the city. He is best known for the glass and iron edicules or canopies, with ornamental Art Nouveau curves, which he designed to cover the entrances of the first stations of the Paris Métro. Between 1890 and 1930, Guimard designed and built some 50 buildings, in addition to 141 subway entrances for the Paris Métro, as well as numerous pieces of furniture and other decorative works. However, in the 1910s Art Nouveau went out of fashion and by the 1960s most of his works had been demolished, and only two of his original Métro édicules were still in place. Guimard's critical reputation revived in the 1960s, in part due to subsequent acquisitions of his work by the Museum of Modern Art, and art historians have noted the originality and importance of his architectural and decorative works. Guimard was a disciple of Viollet-le-Duc. Guimard's first recognized major work was the Castel Béranger in Paris, an apartment building with 36 units constructed between 1895 and 1898, when the architect was just 30 years old. He showed his work at the Paris Salons of April 1894 and 1895, which earned him a prize of a funded voyage first to England and Scotland, and then, in the summer of 1895, to the Netherlands and Belgium.
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