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February 2025 - La maison à gradins, Paris
Image credit: Alan Ainsworth Photography
La maison à gradins, 26 rue Vavin, Paris (1912-14)
Henri Sauvage and Charles Sazarin
26 rue Vavin in Paris’ sixth arrondissement is a large proto-modernist apartment building by Henri Sauvage (1873–1932) and his partner Charles Sarazin (1873-1950). Sauvage, according to David Watkin, ‘…began as a strikingly vivacious Art Nouveau designer and ended by proposing stepped concrete ziggurats which rival the Futurist projects of Sant’Elia.’ Rue Vavin is a significant transitional building in Sauvage’s move towards modernist residential architecture and illustrates the breadth of the early modern movement.
Sauvage achieved early recognition designing art nouveau shop and domestic interiors, wallpapers and furniture in Paris and Brussels. Noted for the Villa Majorelle in Nancy, he created art nouveau private dining rooms for the celebrated Café de Paris later pioneering large scale deco designs for theatres and cinemas, apartment buildings, offices and department stores, where his chef d’oeuvre was La Samaritaine department store in Paris.
Sauvage had been influenced by the theories of the public health campaigner, Dr. Savoire. In 1903, Sauvage made his first venture into lost-cost public housing in Paris through his Société des logements hygiéniques à bon marché (HBM) in partnership with Sarazin. Implied by the name, an emphasis on light, ventilation and cleanliness was evident in schemes at 7 rue de Trétaigne in the 18th (1903-04) and at 163 Boulevard de l’Hôpital in the 13th (1908) arrondissements. Catherine Ford notes that these projects demonstrated that comfortable and hygienic housing for the working class was possible: ‘Hygienic considerations were at the very core of the building’s design.’ Both schemes were constructed with expressed reinforced concrete frames infilled with brick making Sauvage, along with Auguste Perret, a pioneer in this form of construction.
Image credit: Alan Ainsworth Photography
Drawing on his experience of low-cost housing, Sauvage began in 1909 drafting ideas for stepped back apartment block designs. This was in part influenced by hygiene considerations but he also saw it a means of profitably increasing densities. The idea was applied in two buildings at 26 rue Vavin and 13 rue des Amiraux. (1913-1930). Most noticeable at rue Vavin is the series of retreating rooftop gardens and balconies providing access to sunlight and fresh air while ensuring privacy—a radical idea at the time. Internally, large windows and high ceilings made the most of the natural light. Like his public housing schemes, rue Vavin was constructed around a reinforced concrete frame making possible the overhang of each floor and the creation of a large central volume.
The exterior of rue Vavin was faced with white ceramic (more precisely stoneware) tiles made by Maison Hte. Hippolyte Boulenger et. Cie. This again reflected Sauvage’s concerns for hygiene and cleanliness: the façade could be easily washed, a necessity in a city suffering soot and grime pollution. Aesthetic considerations were also involved in the innovative use of industrial materials to create a streamlined modernist appearance. Sauvage added small decorative elements to soften the lines using blue tiles at the top of the window surrounds and the bands forming a border to the window boxes. It is significant that the tiles were used throughout the building so that the structure was not expressed; and, in this respect, it has been suggested that Sauvage might have been influenced by Otto Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna with its stone façade enlivened only by bronze bolts.
Image credit: Alan Ainsworth Photography
Sauvage anticipated considerable success from the step back design (which he even patented in 1912) but the building was not without problems. Originally called Maison à gradins sportive – with plans for games and fencing rooms, libraries and artists’ studios – the building was intended for lower income residents. Financial viability was however premised on achieving 9 or 10 levels giving a total floor are of 1500m squared on a site of under 1800m squared. After two applications were rejected as failing to respect the gabarit (Paris’ urban height and form), a compromise was struck. Sauvage was granted permission for only six storeys so that as built the total floor area was reduced to 1200m squared. Shareholders pulled out and the apartments were sold to wealthier buyers through a co-operative Société des maisons à gradins. Sauvage incorporated his own office inside rue Vavin, partly out of necessity. One feature of Sauvage’s idealism did survive: the integration of the maids’ rooms into the dwelling rather than on the top floor, as was common in prestige Haussmannian Parisian apartment buildings at the time.
Contemporary opinion was divided. The building was praised for its forward-thinking approach to urban living but the combination of modernist ideas with decorative elements drawn from art nouveau was problematic. In particular the tiles appeared to be a vestige of the fin de siècle ethos that modernism sought to move beyond. The stepped form was thought a timid step towards the clean lines and functional simplicity demanded by the modern movement.
Image credit: Alan Ainsworth Photography
Later in life Sauvage developed the step back idea into ever grander pyramidal schemes, mostly unrealised. The step back concept continued to fascinate modernists: Sant’Elia adopted the idea while Le Corbusier (in his 1929 Geneva Mundaneum scheme), several architects of the Italian avant-garde (notably Portalluppi, Muzio, Ponti and Lancia), Adolf Loos in his grandiose Grand Hotel Babylone scheme for the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and Marcel Breur’s study for Elberfield Hospital of 1928 also showed interest. Whatever the advantages of the idea, however, stepped back designs could never compete with the economics of verticality, and the idea remained marginal in the modernist canon.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock nevertheless considered Sauvage a pioneer of the modern movement and others praise him as an early exponent of the plastic potentialities of concrete construction and for his radical urban planning ideas designed to foster healthy lifestyles. This last concern clearly prefigures Le Corbusier’s belief in light, soon a defining characteristic of modernist residential architecture. Jean-Baptiste Minnaert explains in his biography that Le Corbusier also admired Sauvage because of his advanced attitude toward industrialized building processes – not just step backs, but his systems using both metal and reinforced concrete telescopic pylons to hoist preassembled floors.
The choice of 26 rue Vavin as the home of Marlon Brando’s lover, Maria Schneider, in the final scenes of Last Tango in Paris certainly also helped raise the building’s profile – if for rather different reasons.
Alan Ainsworth is a freelance photographer and writer. His most recent book is Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz (Intellect/University of Chicago), 2022. His website is www.alanainsworthphotography.com
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