The dead end of bourgeois architecture

Monument history

The mansion-workshop built in 1927 in Paris by French Art Deco master Robert Mallet-Stevens for the artists of the Martel brothers has opened to the public. Its owners, antique dealers, clearly consider the house one of the finest exhibits in their collection of architecture and applied arts. Kommersant correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov took the opportunity to look at how “serenely and without sadness” France lived before the war.

In the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris, traces of neighboring towns are visible, absorbed by the growing capital at the end of the 19th century. One of them in 1860 was Auteuil. In the 1920s, when this town grew into the city, an amazing street appeared here, which half a century later was called “Malle-Stevens Street”. Planned out of only seven houses (only six of them were built), this is not even a street, but a dead end. Length – 77 meters, width – 7. By order of the owner, banker Daniel Dreyfus, all the houses were designed by the brilliant Parisian architect Robert Malle-Stevens (1886-1945).

“The street that I was lucky enough to build is in Auteuil. Trading on it is prohibited. It is intended exclusively for housing, for recreation, the very sight of it gives rise to serenity without sadness, ”wrote Malle-Stevens about his work, solemnly presented to Parisians on July 20, 1927.

In interwar French architecture, which we previously only looked at through the round glasses of the functionalist Le Corbusier, this Art Deco genius had an enviable role. Now, in socialist France, he is accused of absolute deafness to social utopias. He did not at all consider, like other modernists, that architecture owes some kind of debt to society and can become an alternative to revolution. Malle-Stevens did not put forward slander theories and did not engage in slanderous practice. It is hard to imagine him as a builder of student dormitories, or lodging houses for the Salvation Army, or the Palace of Soviets for the Bolsheviks. He basically worked for the bourgeoisie, even artists. When his wealthy brethren dreamed of a luxurious and unusual home, they went to Malle-Stevens, as did the couturier Paul Poiret, the stained glass and glass artist Louis Barillet, or the muralist Jean and Joel Martel (1896-1966). The twin brothers decided to settle in the capital on a new architectural street.

The Art Deco that won the Paris Exhibition in 1925 inherited Functionalism, but it was a very different, luxurious Functionalism. The idea of ​​”living cells” for the proletarians was replaced by the idea of ​​”modern palaces” for the bourgeoisie. Malle-Stevens Street is a parade of huge mansions in the forms of “modern architecture”. Each of them could accommodate a work club or an apartment building, which was partly done in the 1950s and 1970s, when they began to re-plan and build on them. In those years, the lanterns and small forms drawn by Malle-Stevens disappeared, only by a miracle did the general design of the basement, the same for all houses, survive. The street itself could have disappeared, but in 1975 it was placed under protection, and in 2000 it was recognized as a single architectural monument.

By that time, many of the former residents were gone. The war has drawn the line. Malle-Stevens himself, who lived at No. 12, fled from the Germans to Vichy French territory, fearing for the fate of his Jewish wife, and for good reason. The family of the writer and film producer Eric Allatini, the owners of the 3/5 house, was arrested by the French Gestapo in 1942, and the fascist secret police department was comfortably housed in their mansion. Allatini never returned home from Auschwitz.

The Martel brothers have kept their house number 10 longer than all their neighbors. They lived until 1966, and their heirs sold the building only in the 1990s. By that time, the mansion was already under guard, and it did not have to be rebuilt for the new owners, because for each of the brothers and their father, separate two-story apartments, one above the other, were invented in advance. As a result, although the house is now owned by different families and owners, it remains the only monument from the time of Mallet-Stevens on the street that has not changed at all.

The former mansion-workshop is divided into two parts, a tower with a rounded staircase rises between them. On the roof, it turns into a gazebo, from which the Martels could admire the bucolic panorama of Auteuil. The residential part is on the right, and now you can’t go up there, except perhaps for a visit. It is known, however, that the furniture, specially created for the owners by Charlotte Perriand, Gabriel Guevrekyan, Jean Prouvé, Marcel Breuer, did not remain in the apartments of this part, it was sold by the heirs, and now it is stored in the storerooms of the Pompidou Center. But on the left side, a three-level sculpture workshop is open to visitors, which has now been turned into a kind of museum of furniture and decorative art of art deco.

The workshop belongs to one of the residents of the house, gallery owner Erik Tushaly, whose Galerie 54 sells design objects and even architecture of the 20th century. The old sculpture workshop is the real Ali Baba’s cave. Here stand and hang works by Charlotte Perriand, the Martel brothers, Jean Prouvé, Pierre Jeanneret, Jean Lurs and other classics of modernism, although made for other customers and, quite likely, only waiting for buyers, but still corresponding to the style of the interior.

You can get inside during a few summer days, visits are completed until next year, but until then there is consolation. The owner of the gallery, not for nothing called the “Indiana Jones of design”, found in Saint-Jean-de-Luz a fountain from the garden of the casino, built by Malle-Stevens in 1928, bought it and installed it in front of the house. The entire Parisian street, solemnly opened 95 years ago, has been turned into a real open-air museum, where the history of old France of the last century lives on 77 meters.