Lurçat, André Émile Lucien

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Lurçat, André Émile Lucien (1894–1970). French architect, he embraced the doctrines promoted by Le Corbusier and others, and was a founding-member of CIAM. He designed several villas and studios, including the Huggler House, Cité Seurat, Paris (1925–6), the Villa Michel, Versailles (1926), and the Guggenbuhl House, Paris (1927), all pioneering Modern Movement works. A prolific polemicist, he promoted both Communism and Modernism with zeal, and at the École Karl-Marx, Villejuif (1931–3), attempted to associate architectural forms with the revoltionary workers' movement. Invited to Moscow in 1934, he carried the Bauhaus and CIAM positions there, only to find they did not fit into the Stalinist stance of Socialist Realism in which powerful, stripped Neo-Classicism loomed large. He accepted the need for monumentality in architecture imposed during the Stalin era (1925–53), as his later works, including his many buildings at St-Denis and Maubeuge (1946–50), demonstrate.

Bibliography

J-L. Cohen (1995);
Giedion (1928);
Hilaire (1994);
Joly (1995);
Lurçat (1929, 1953–7);
Piccinato (1965);
Sartoris (1936);
Tafuri & and Dal Co (1986);
Jane Turner (1996);
van Vynckt (ed.) (1993)

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