SPACES
Villa Martel
Parisian MasterPiece
By Valérie de Calignon
Photography by Roland Halbe

In the charming 16th arrondissement in Paris, near the Jasmin Metro stop, it is not unusual to spy an architecture lover, map in hand, moving slowly up the rue d’Yvette towards the rue docteur Blanche. Opening out from this street, a square of the same name contains the Le Corbusier Foundation, housed in the La Roche and Jeanneret villas designed by the architect in 1925. A bit farther down the street is the studio of architect Pierre Patout, built in 1928. And a few yards to the right is the rue Mallet-Stevens, a residential cul-de-sac about 100 yards long, that bears the name of the architect who designed all its structures between 1926 and 1934.

As one of the rare practitioners in France of the International Style between the world wars (others included Le Corbusier, André Lurçat, Jean Prouvé and René Herbst), Robert Mallet-Stevens should figure proudly in the history of modern architecture. But as an aesthete among more politically engaged architects, he was criticized by theoreticians of the modern movement for a formalism that ignored issues of urban planning. Described, above all, by his contemporaries as a sensitive and elegant man, Rob Mallet-Stevens, as he was known, was almost forgotten after his death in 1945. The destruction of his archives, carried out at his own request, partially explains this absence of public visibility. It is only thanks to the tenacity of several passionate researchers that a first monograph, Rob Mallet-Stevens architecte (Éditions des Archives d’Architecture Moderne), was published in 1980, kindling the rediscovery of his work. Then, in 2005, the Centre Georges Pompidou dedicated a major retrospective exhibition to Mallet-Stevens, engendering a reappraisal of his contributions to the modern movement.

Born in 1886 in Paris to a Belgian family, Mallet-Stevens was deeply influenced, as an architecture student, by closely following the construction of the Palais Stocklet in Brussels, designed for his uncle Adolf Stocklet by architect Josef Hoffmann, member of the Viennese Secession and co-founder Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132