Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Etien Santiago
World War I forced many European architects to temporarily shutter their practices and take up alternate activities. One such architect was Hector Guimard, a French leader of Art Nouveau. In the absence of commissions, he spent the war years vigorously advocating for a world government, which he called the “Peace-State,” to prevent armed conflicts between member countries. Guimard thus contributed to the groundswell of transatlantic conversations that paved the way for the 1920 inauguration of the League of Nations, antecedent to the United Nations. Publications about Guimard have consistently mentioned this activism only in passing (Vigne 2003, 345-46; Hanks 2021, 5). This is because, at first glance, it does not appear to be directly relevant to his career as a creative. Yet I will argue that Guimard’s wartime work on international politics was highly pertinent to his subsequent design work. Unfolding the ideal geopolitical order that he defended can help us better understand his evolving approach to architectural design. This paper traces how the standardized housing systems that Guimard devised from 1920 to 1921 translated his ideas for a Peace-State into architecture. In their writings, Georges Vigne, Philippe Thiébaut, and Barry Bergdoll have already studied these systems for mass-produced houses (Vigne 2003, 348; Thiébaut 1992, 88-90; Bergdoll 2021, 164-75). The paper complements their insights with new observations about Guimard’s system to tease out underlying resonances between it and his vision for a world government. Both hinged on the premise that a productive peacetime could only emerge from embracing—rather than rejecting—the disruptive byproducts of the 1914 Great War. Beyond advancing a new interpretation of this late stage in Guimard’s career, this paper will also make a broader contribution. It will build on recent scholarship, notably by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Esra Akcan, to demonstrate the opportunities of reading architectural designs in relation to contemporaneous geopolitical discussions (Peklonen 2009; Akcan 2012).
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.35
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
