Mallet-Stevens, Robert

▪ French architect

born March 24, 1886, Paris, France

died Feb. 10, 1945, Paris

      French architect known principally for his modernistic works in France during the 1920s and '30s.

      Mallet-Stevens received his formal training at the École Speciale d'Architecture, Paris. He came to know the work of other young architects at the Salons d'Automnes of 1912–14, and after the war he emerged as a fashionable and even mildly avant-garde designer.

      One of his first commissions was for the villa of the Vicomte de Noailles at Hyères, Fr. The house was used by Man Ray as the set for his film Les Mystères du Château du Dé. The following year, Mallet-Stevens collaborated with the painter Fernand Léger and others on Marcel Lherbier's film L'Inhumaine. The house designed for the film and the villa de Noailles are representative of Mallet-Stevens' sophisticated synthesis of Cubist painting, Art Deco details, and other artistic modes of the time.

      Typically, Mallet-Stevens drew artists, musicians, and others into his projects, as he did for the Tourism pavilion and so-called French embassy he designed at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris, 1925, the exposition that lent its name to the style termed “Art Deco.” The musicians Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger and the painters Léger and Robert Delaunay worked on this project.

      Mallet-Stevens was expert in the uses of metal framing and reinforced concrete; among the structures in which such techniques were applied is a block of apartments (1926–27) built on the rue Mallet-Stevens, Paris, so named in honour of the architect.

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