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