Paul Philippe Cret

Background

Paul Philippe Cret was born on October 23, 1876 in Lyons, France. He was the only child of Paul Adolphe and Anna Caroline (Durand) Cret. An uncle was an architect, and at fourteen Cret decided to follow that profession.

Education

He began the study of architecture in 1893 at the École des Beaux Arts of Lyons and transferred to the École des Beaux Arts of Paris, where between 1897 and 1903 he was enrolled in the Atelier Pascal. In 1940 Harvard awarded him an honorary degree, as had Brown and Pennsylvania earlier.

Career

His brilliant record prompted the University of Pennsylvania to offer Cret a position as assistant professor of (architectural) design upon completion of his work for the diploma. Thus in the fall of 1903 he began an association that was to continue (after 1907 as professor of design) until his retirement in 1937. During that period architectural education in the United States came to be based largely on the precepts of the French École, with Cret as its most successful and respected exponent.

He was in France for the summer when the war broke out and hence reported for mobilization, serving at first in the Alpine Chasseurs and later as an officer interpreter attached to the American Expeditionary Forces. In the aftermath of the war came an unprecedented demand for commemorative architecture, long a Beaux Arts concern.

While still in uniform Cret was asked by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt to design a memorial to her son Quentin at Chambéry, France (1919); and beginning in 1925 he served as architectural consultant to the American Battle Monuments Commission. His own designs for the monuments at Varennes and Fismes (both for the Pennsylvania Battle Monuments Commission, 1924), as well as those at Château-Thierry (1928), Bellicourt, Gibraltar (1930), and Waereghem, Belgium (1927), are usually considered among his best work, as is the memorial at Providence (1927), a well-proportioned column with a handsomely sculptured base. Impatient with both the conservatism of the traditionalists and the pretensions of the self-styled moderns, Cret hoped to see American architecture evolve in the direction of a style that would have links with the past but would also be expressive of his own time--a kind of twentieth-century classicism based on good proportion, simplification, and a design that was the natural outgrowth of its structural system. With the possible exception of the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia (1928), designed in association with Jacques Grèber and perhaps for that reason the most "French" of his buildings, Cret's own search for such a modern American style was remarkably consistent. It may be followed in his major postwar commissions, beginning with the modified Renaissance of the Detroit Institute of Arts (1922, with Zantzinger, Borie & Medary) or the Barnes Foundation Gallery at Merion (1923), and continuing through the massive and severely geometric Integrity Trust Company in Philadelphia (1923) to the more restrained urbanity of the Hartford County Building (1926, with Smith & Bassett) and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. (1931, with Alexander Trowbridge as consulting architect). With the last two buildings also belongs much of Cret's work for the federal government: the courthouse at Fort Worth, Texas (1933), several post offices, and especially the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia (1932) and the Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, D. C. (1937), both of which are among his most successful and characteristic designs.

Cret helped plan the Century of Progress Exposition held at Chicago in 1933, as a member of its architectural commission. His particular contribution to this "festive stage setting"--to use his own words--was the Hall of Science, a windowless temporary building designed in the shape of a large U and devoid of any obvious reference to past styles.

Though in later years he had a number of partners, most of them former pupils, Cret's firm was known by his name alone as long as he lived, and he continued to take a close personal interest in what must have been as varied an architectural practice as any of its time. In fact, it was one of his major tenets that nothing which required careful detailing and good proportions was too insignificant for the architect's attention. Though known principally for its public structures, the firm also designed at least seven private residences; a central heating plant for Washington, D. C. (1931); a power plant for Providence (1940); three generating stations; the Pachyderm Building (1938) and the Service Building (1935) for the Philadelphia Zoo; and, after 1932 (in association with others), nearly a dozen of the new streamlined trains for as many different railroads. Cret also collaborated with engineers on the Bonneville Dam project on the Columbia River (1934) and on at least eight major bridges, the most important of which was the one over the Delaware River, now named for Benjamin Franklin (1922, with Ralph Modjeski)--in its day the longest suspension bridge in the world. Universities for which he made planning studies include Wisconsin (1914, with W. P. Laird), Brown (1922), Pennsylvania (1925), and Texas (1930); for the last he also designed a number of buildings in association with Robert L. White. Throughout his career Cret was keenly interested in relationships among the arts, and sculpture played an important part in most of his designs. His accomplishments as architect, planner, and teacher brought Cret recognition in many forms: the Philadelphia Award (1931); the medal of honor of the Architectural League of New York (1928); and, most important, the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects (1938), of which he was also a fellow.

He was elected to the National Academy of Design (1935) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1941).

His hearing had been impaired during the war, and in later years he was almost completely deaf, while an operation on his larynx left him unable to speak. Communicating by pencil and paper, he nevertheless continued his work and maintained his good humor until his death at sixty-eight, of a heart ailment, in a Philadelphia hospital. In his will he specified that nearly half of his estate of $200, 000 was to go, after the death of his wife, to the University of Pennsylvania for its School of Architecture. The artistic creed of Cret and others who believed that the past still had value for the present was challenged by the European architects who took up residence in the United States just prior to World War II and who sought to supplant the teaching of the French Ïcole with that of the German Bauhaus. It seems likely, however, that future historians may assign Cret a place nearer the mainstream of American architecture than some of his critics have supposed. If he was not one of the truly "modern" architects of the twentieth century, at least his emphasis on rationality, restraint, clarity, and proportion prepared the stage for those who were.

Achievements

• Cret won numerous design competitions, the first (in collaboration with Albert Kelsey) for the building housing the International Bureau of American Republics (later the Pan American Union) in Washington, D. C. (1907). It is considered Cret’s best work, combining architectural styles of North and South America in an eclectic kind of classicism. In 1913 he won the commission for the Central Library Building at Indianapolis, again as the result of a competition, in this instance in association with the Philadelphia firm of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary. In 1896 he won Prix de Paris.

Connections

Early in his career, on August 29, 1905, Cret had married Marguerite Lahalle of Orleans, France; they had no children.

Father:

Paul Adolphe Cret

Mother:

Anna Caroline (Durand) Cret

Spouse:

Marguerite Lahalle

References

• Paul Philippe Cret: Architect and Teacher
• The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret (Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity)