Le Castel Béranger, Paris

Le Castel Béranger, 14, Rue la Fontaine, Paris, France. 1894-1898.

This house was designed by Hector Guimard, one of the most prominent architects from the French Art Nouveau movement. The Castel Béranger won a City of Paris award for its facade in 1899.

"Never entirely resolved as a total composition, the Castel Béranger is nonetheless an important transitional work in Guimard's career. The stem and branch-like character of both the interior furnishing and the exterior ironwork stand in a curious and brittle contrast to the articulate, architectonic but disjunctive elements that make up the cumbersome mass of the building's exterior. With 36 apartments, each different from the next, the Castel Béranger is a curious compound of rational planning and non-rational intent and expression. Guimard was to exploit its competition as an occasion for promoting le style Guimard. To this end he staged an exhibition of the building and its contents in the Salon du Figaro in 1899, while simultaneously publishing a book of the work under the title, L'Art dans l'habitation moderne. Le Castel Béranger. More acerbic than his flamboyant country houses of the turn of the century and located in the fashionable, fast-growing suburb of Auteuil, the Castel Béranger gave Guimard a prime opportunity with which to demonstrate the synthetic subtleties of his style, in which urban and rustic references could be judiciously mixed together."

Source: Kenneth Frampton and Yukio Futagawa, Modern Architecture 1851-1945.