Hector Guimard is the architect most associated with Art Nouveau in Paris, and his work is scattered across the city. The metro entrances he designed are the most visible legacy. But his finest buildings are concentrated in the 16th arrondissement, on the quiet streets between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, where he built private villas for wealthy clients between 1895 and 1910.
The Castel Béranger, the Hôtel Guimard, the Villa Jassedé: these are buildings that provoked scandals when they were built and have never entirely lost their power to surprise. Art Nouveau was a deliberate break with academic tradition, drawing on natural forms, plants, shells, bones, to create an architecture that had no precedent and found very few followers after 1914.
What you will see
The Castel Béranger. Guimard's first major work, finished in 1898, which won the prize for the best façade in Paris and was controversial the same day for its asymmetry and its organic, almost animal forms. The metro entrances. The cast-iron structures Guimard designed for the new Paris metro in 1900, several of which still stand in the neighbourhood. The private villas. A sequence of houses built for wealthy clients, each one different, each pushing the ornamental language of Art Nouveau a little further. The rue Mallet-Stevens. A short detour to the street where a later generation of modernist architects built six houses in the 1920s, which shows, in a single block, exactly what came after Art Nouveau and chose to reject it.
Guimard's façades · the metro entrances · what came after
Pépin's advice
This is a morning tour. The 16th arrondissement is residential and quiet. Early morning is the best time to see the façades without the parked cars and delivery trucks that crowd the streets later in the day.
Combine with the Marmottan. The Musée Marmottan is fifteen minutes away on foot. A morning on the Art Nouveau streets followed by the Monet collection is a coherent way to spend the day, and we can build it around either.
