Art Deco. Victoria Charles
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with wood, and covered with sandstone tiles, constituted an apogee of great allure. Close to them, the low white pavilions which faced each other and were reflected in mirror-like water with blue edges, the garden, surrounded by small square plinths which connected the festoons, full of refinement and delicacy. The pavilions were made of reinforced stone, covered with sandstone until halfway-up. No window punctuated the façade, so that no wall’s inside surface was lost for the presentation of objects. The light came from the ceiling. It was a simple and expressive project of a homogeneous composition, despite its division into two parts, imposed by the site. The goal was to highlight ceramic as a resource for the interior or exterior decoration of the house and for the decoration of a garden. This goal was achieved.
Good architecture is made from the inside out. The internal plan of the Exhibition determined the place, the importance, and the character of the doors. Two of the most important ones were situated at the end of the two main thoroughfares and opened up for the visitor coming from the centre of the city. At a time when the barriers fall, when the exchanges of all kinds multiply, does not the phrase “monumental gate” awaken more than a vague idea? In fact, they were not the gates of cities, but the gates of an exhibition. Since an enclosure had been traced, it was necessary to create gates to get in and get out. For all of them, the same strategy was adopted: the entrance on the sides where the visitors waited in lines, the exit in the middle where they could come and go without obstruction, side-by-side, in small groups. The Gate of Honour opened onto the Avenue Nicolas II. Let us imagine it as we would have seen it if the projects of the architects Henri Favier and André Ventre had been carried out with permanent materials. Arranged two by two, sixteen polished granite pylons connected by openwork grids and pressed metal friezes were strongly drawn up in the plan. Bronze basins stood on them from which neon-illuminated glass flowed at night. Carried out by means of iron ribbons passed through the rolling mill, then cut, curved, and assembled in patterns of water jets which were repeated in staggered rows; the grids were to prove that the machine, subjected to human intelligence, can create beauty as well as the hand, just more economically. In fact, these materials and this work were imitated in shiny plaster. The visitor was only to assess what was in front of him as full-scale mock-up. But we could admire the elegance of the silhouettes, the equal distribution of the framework and the openwork panels, the welcoming appearance of the whole which, although starting out with a wide angled frame, gradually narrowed, guiding the visitor and his view towards the centre of the Exhibition.
Favier and Ventre only had to raise a gate spanning an avenue lined with constructions to house exhibits. More complex was the problem Patout had to deal with at the entrance of the Cours-la-Reine. Obliged to treat the trees with care and to only use the gaps between their main branches, he was required to build constructions high enough to attract attention from far away and stable enough to resist the wind, but without being able to use foundations; moreover he had to take into account the fact that the gate was shaped like a spire, that could be seen from different directions. He thus arranged his piece in a circle, the only non-deformable figure: ten square columns, crowned with basins out of which beams of light would spout. Between these pylons, the outgoing flow of visitors would go out, leaving in all directions. The entrances were to the right and to the left: four lines, arranged in a circle of square bases, connected by chains, channelled the crowd towards the turnstiles.
Each pylon measured 72 feet in height, 11 and a half feet in width and weighed approximately 100 metric tons. They were built out of reinforced clinker concrete. Their walls, three inches thick, were coated on the outside in a lime mortar. An open door located nearly ten feet above the ground, and a hook-on ladder placed on the inside, gave access to the top to service the lighting. Due to the impossibility of digging the ground because of the sewers, of the tramlines, the gas and water pipes, and the electric cables; Patout had built some of the pylons on reinforced concrete bridges, others on concrete plinths or stone slabs which distributed the load in low pressure over the loose ground. Lastly, to ensure their stability, he ballasted them at the base by piling up paving stones between their walls to a height of ten feet above the ground. Despite being very interesting from the point of view of the technical challenges, with simple lines, and an original and well-conceived design in order to catch the eye from afar, the merits of the work were, however, much discussed. We acknowledge the fact that, on one point, the criticism is deserved, specifically on what was not done. At certain times, a door must be closed, even if it is called “monumental entrance”. However, no means of closure having been planned, it was necessary, in order to comply with the rules of the customs warehouses, to put up a wooden barrier with full doors behind the pylons, of little monumental effect.
The architect was not to blame for having disturbed the peace of the beautiful decor to which many eyes were accustomed. Any other construction in a new style, in its place, would also undoubtedly have appeared just as discordant. Another gate, the third most important, gave a merry welcome to the crowd: the Porte d’Orsay, built from the designs of the architect Boileau. Its two pillars, with a geometric design, supported a large beam on which a decorated metal banner was suspended, on one side with large typeface, on the other by a semi-cubist painting by Voguet. However, the visitor, passing under this banner, did not get the impression of a “sword of Damocles” because the banner was hidden from him by a circular plate which connected the two pillars, 11 feet above the ground, which sheltered the turnstiles of the rain and the sun. The four symmetrical gates of the Rue de Constantine and Rue Fabert, works of Lucien Woog, Pierre Ferret, Marrast, and Herscher, were used at the same time as entrances to the Exhibition and galleries: hence their deep porches and pylon surrounding. At the site of the Victor-Emmanuel-III, Albert I, and Grenelle gates, the architects Guidetti, Adolphe Thiers, and Levard carried out a project already simple in itself with further simplicity.
Arthur E. Harvey, Spring Arts Tower, terracotta and black and enamelled gold cladding (detail), 1931.
Spring Arts Tower (formerly the headquarters of the Crocker National Bank), Los Angeles.
Located near the Gate of Honour is the tourist information pavilion. In spite of its rather strange design, it comprised an element which, as with the pylons, served only to attract visitors. It was a kind of tower, or rather mast, formed by two thin walls with sharp edges, coated with a rough mortar, and cut at right angles. It housed, at a height of a little over 100 feet, the rectangular case of an electric clock, the elegant and spiritual nature of a sculptor as much as of an architect. If the small canopies of the clock case could be louvres, three small planks of concrete placed horizontally and equidistant of one another, the one below seemed to have no other purpose but to create recalls of forms, contrasts of light and shade: a decoration in the same capacity as the garlands of the past but of a more severe aspect. This new type of mast had four vertical posts of reinforced concrete as its framework, connected by beams forming standoffs, with the space between them which was bricked up. They went down 21 feet below the ground where they drowned into a reinforced concrete footing. Thus, the lowering of the centre of gravity had ensured the stability of the ensemble. In the hall, the entrance of which was announced by this mast, Mallet-Stevens used reinforced concrete with such skill, but without compromising the decoration. The work could not have been better conceived to suit its purpose. Outside, there was an almost full and rather mysterious wall. Inside, a room, 66 feet long, surrounded by exchange and information services. The great light which lit them up fell from the ceiling and poured through stained glass windows, set in a bay window which measured only 20 inches in height, but which circled the whole hall with a continuous band of images of the most beautiful monuments of France toppling over one another, like scenery whizzing past the window of a car travelling at top speed. The part of the wall which surmounted this translucent frieze seemed, paradoxically, to be leaning on it. In fact, it was supported by strong reinforced concrete beams, placed on pillars so thin that one did not notice their presence.
Pavilions of cities or regions, of department stores, of an individual or a group in the French section numbered around a hundred. On one of the sites, under the shade of the Champs-Élysées and decorated with flowers, Paris wanted to exhibit the work of its schoolchildren. Two long, symmetrical, robust, and elegant wings were connected by a hall which was used as a reception room for the Municipal Council. Full and empty, projections and recesses were learnedly balanced by the architect Roger Bouvard. Each wing ended