Auguste PERRET
1874 - 1954
Auguste Perret was born in 1874 in the suburbs of Brussels. It was in the family business, his father was a stonemason, that he was introduced to construction processes before studying at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. .
With his two brothers Gustave and Claude, he was one of the first to use reinforced concrete in construction despite the clashes with the conservatives of the profession.
At the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism appointed him chief architect of the reconstruction of Le Havre, a city-martyrdom more than 85% destroyed.
Long denigrated by historians and theoreticians of the Modern Movement, more precisely by relatives of Le Corbusier,considering him an engineer rather than an architect.
It was only at the end of the various crises and conflicts of this movement that his work was finally recognized at its fair value.
He now appears as one of the major architects of his time and of the school of structural classicism.
He remained attached to the reinforced concrete which he knew how to magnify (by dressing, bush-hammering, washing, etc.), always respecting these principles:
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unadorned style
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post-beam-slab structure
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free plan
His work is now recognized, which has not always been the case. The view of the coherence of his work has changed since then, it took more than fifty years for that.
