Auguste Perret And His Reinforced Concrete Architecture (1903-1927)

Auguste Perret (1874-1954) was a great French architect during the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. His career is inextricably linked to the constructional technique of reinforced concrete framework: in works such as his apartment building in rue Franklin, Paris, of 1903, concrete - a material that previously had been perceived as common and industrial - was reinvented, handle artistically and given its own idiom.The dissertation try to demonstrate the determining role of the reinforced concrete frame and Perret in the the development of architectural modernism by studying Perret's three important buildings- the 25bis rue Franlin, the Theatre des Champs Elysees and the Church of Notre-Dame du Raincy. The second chapter analyses the significance of the 25bis rue Franlin. The discussion starts with the background of family in which Perret's father was a stone mason, while Perret's choice of concrete was to a large degree formed by Viollet-le-Duc and rationalism. The second chapter analyses the Theatre des Champs Elysees. In this building, the threads of his major concerns-the material-constructional, and the classically conceptual-come together in a rich and historically complexe expression. The forth chapter analyses Church of Notre-Dame du Raincy. The final fusion of classical rationalism with the Greco-Gothic ideal came with the church, commissioned in 1922 as a memorial to those who were killed in the battle of the Ourcq in the First World War.At last, the dissertation will sum up the Perret's typical ideas of reinforced concrete architecture by investigating the "Conversation with Paul Valery".