Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10 1867 - New York, May 20 1942) was an architect, who is widely considered today to be the most prominent representative of artists and architects who worked in the Art Nouveau style in France at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Within the international context of Art Nouveau, Guimard appears as an isolated sniper: he leaves no disciple behind him, nor any school, and this explains why history was for a long time tempted to regard him as a secondary player in this movement – an absence of posterity which contrasts with the extraordinary formal and typological profusion of his architectural and decorative work, where the architect gave the best of himself in a relatively short fifteen years of amazing creative activity.

As of his studies of architecture, Guimard, like many other French nineteenth-century architects, matriculated to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he became acquainted with the theories of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. These rationalist ideas provided the foundations, since 1863, of the future structural principles of Art Nouveau. The Guimard conversion to the style itself is as for it more sudden: it is done during a trip to Brussels, where he visits the Tassel hotel of Victor Horta. The characteristic realization of this time, the Castel Béranger [1] (1898), illustrates this moment of transition which sees the shock between these two heritages : on the medieval inspirated geometrical volumes of the carcass work spreads with profusion the organic line « in blow of whip » [2] imported of Belgium.

The Castel Béranger makes Guimard famous of the day at the following day and many orders then enable him to continue his aesthetic research always more – the stylistic harmony and continuity in particular (a major ideal of Art Nouveau), which push him towards a quasi totalitarian design of the interior decoration, culminating in 1909 with the hotel Guimard [3] (gift of wedding to his rich American wife) where ovoid rooms [4] impose unique pieces of furniture, integral part of the building.

If the well of light suitable for Victor Horta is a data rather absent of his work (except in the late example of the Mezzara hotel [5], in 1910), Guimard undertakes astonishing space experiments however, in the volumetry of his constructions in particular : the Coilliot house [6] and its disconcerting double-frontage (1898), La Bluette [7] and its beautiful volumetric harmony (1898), and especially the Castel Henriette [8] (1899) and the Castel d’Orgeval [9] (1905), radical demonstrations of a vigorous and asymmetrical "free plan", twenty-five years before the theories of Le Corbusier. Symmetry is however not proscribed : the splendid Nozal hotel [10], in 1905, uses the rational disposition of a plan in square proposed by Viollet-le-Duc.

The structural innovations do not miss either, as in the extraordinary concert hall Humbert-de-Romans [11] (1901), where a complex frame splits the sound waves to lead to perfect acoustics ; or as in the hotel Guimard (1909), where the narrowness of the ground makes it possible to the architect to reject any carrying function on the external walls and thus to release the interior spaces arrangement, different from one floor to another [12] ; etc.

Curious and inventive spirit, Guimard is also a precursor of the industrial standardization, insofar as he wishes to diffuse the new art on a large scale. In this field he knows a real success – in spite of the scandals – with his famous entries of the Parisian Subway [13], flexible constructions where triumph the structural ornament principle of Viollet-le-Duc. The idea is taken up – but with less success – in 1907 with a catalogue of cast iron elements applicable to buildings : Artistic Cast Iron, Guimard Style [14].

As for the global architectural space, the intrinsic design of his art objects proceed of the same ideal of formal continuity (which makes it possible to amalgamate all the practical functions in a single body, as with the Vase des Binelles [15], of 1903) and linear design, as in the drawing of its pieces of furniture [16], harmonious and lightly silhouetted.

His inimitable stylistic vocabulary proceeds of a particularly suggestive vegetable organicism, while remaining resolutely on the slope of abstraction. Flexible mouldings and nervous movements invest stone as well as wood ; in the two dimensions, Guimard creates true abstract compositions which adapt with same ease to stained glass [17] (Mezzara hotel, 1910), to ceramics panel [18] (Coilliot house, 1898), to wrought iron [19] (Castel Henriette, 1899), to wallpaper [20] (Castel Béranger, 1898) or to fabric [21] (Guimard hotel, 1909).

But in spite of this fireworks of innovations and various demonstrations, the press and the public are quickly diverted of Guimard : less than the work, it is the man who irritates. And as a worthy representant of Art Nouveau, it is itself victim of inherent contradictions of the ideals of the movement : his most completed creations are financially inaccessible to the greatest number, and on the contrary his attempts to standardization don’t square very well its very personal vocabulary. He is finally completely forgotten when he dies in New York in 1942, where the fear of the war had made him be exiled (his wife was Jewish).

Afterwards too many destructions, any isolated explorers (the first "hectorologists") go to the rediscovery of the artist and his universe about the years 1960-1970 and reconstitute its history patiently. If the major part is done in this field, the fact is that, hundred years after the « magnificent gesture » of Art Nouveau (Le Corbusier), the majority of the buildings of Hector Guimard remain inaccessible to the public, and that a Guimard Museum is still not inaugurated in France.

• LE CERCLE GUIMARD - The association for the protection and the promotion of the works of Hector Guimard
• lartnouveau.com - The work of Hector Guimard in Paris and in France