Arts and Letters

It is as a great designer of public buildings that Paul Cret is best known, and as such he was one of the acknowledged leaders of his generation during his entire career. To his architecture he gave a distinction equaled by few of his contemporaries. So fine is the quality of the great examples of his work that his stature in history is likely to increase through the years rather than diminish. All this is the more extraordinary in view of the tremendous handicaps involved in the early impairment of his hearing and later the complete loss of his voice.

Born in Lyons, France, on October 23, 1876, he was fourteen when he had already made his decision to become an architect, and after school and in the summer worked in the office of his uncle, Johannes Bernard, an architect of high ideals and small practice. From this time on throughout his life, design was his consuming passion. From his uncle's office he went on to study at the École des Beaux Arts at Lyons, where he won the coveted Paris Prize which took him to the École des Beaux Arts at Paris. There, as a member of the Atelier Pascal, he became one of the outstanding students, winning a number of prizes and the high esteem of his fellows.

When in 1903 the University of Pennsylvania sought a critic in design, the Americans among the students at the Beaux Arts recommended Paul Cret, and he agreed to come to America. To quote from one of his distinguished former pupils:

He was an ideal teacher in those early years: patient, inspiring, guiding each student to the development of his own powers of expression, enforcing it all by a marvelous enthusiasm and rare humor that carried every point home and gave it its own personal importance. No man who had come under his influence failed to carry away some of his extraordinary breadth, poise, clarity, and taste. He placed particular emphasis on the necessity of training in taste for the pursuit of that beauty which distinguishes architecture from building or engineering.

Later, in the years of his practice, he recruited the larger part of his assistants from the ranks of his former students. They still looked up to him as the master and considered his office a sort of postgraduate course with the incidental advantage of being paid. Even in his fullest years, Cret never permitted his office to become so large that he lost touch with all details of the work in hand.

In 1907, four years after coming to this country, he stirred the architectural profession by winning, with Albert Kelsey, the competition for the headquarters of the Pan American Republics to be built in Washington on the Mall. This was a brilliant and conspicuous achievement and brought him immediate fame. The Pan American Building, when executed, with its fine gardens and entourage, was at once a national success. There was a freshness about it and an originality that forecast at that time the trend of Cret's development.

The one interruption of Cret's practice was his service in the First World War. Reporting for mobilization in 1914 when he had returned to France for the summer, he first saw service as a foot soldier in the chasseurs in the front lines. Later his architectural talents were utilized in reconnoitering no-man's land in order to make topographical panoramas of the terrain for the use of the combat troops in the next day's fighting. When his exceptional ability in this work was discovered, he was made an instructor. With the entry of the United States into the war, he became an officer interpreter attached to the 1st Division of the A.E.F. He emerged from the war with the Croix de Guerre, and as an officer of the Legion of Honor. He was on well-known ground when later he designed his series of great battle monuments in France on the very battlefields over which he had fought—at Varennes, Fismes, and Chateau-Thierry. Into these, as he said, "he put his love for the country of his birth as well as for the country of his adoption." These memorials are among his finest designs.

With his clear logical mind, his passion for order and beauty and his fastidious taste, his development as a creative architect was an orderly and consistent process throughout the thirty years of his practice. He possessed powers of imagination and strength of character of the highest order. He made up his mind rapidly and clearly as to what he wanted to do, and was willing to go to infinite pains and to the limit of his abilities to perfect what he had decided on. His constructed work shows the study that was put into it. Not only were the proportions of the whole even down to the smallest detail given intensive study, but each detail was studied with full-size drawings rendered in charcoal; and few of these left his office without his own hand having worked over them.

In spite of the originality and boldness of his approach to his problems, he seldom produced a revolutionary design, but in his own words preferred a "continual slight novelty." The balance of these forces within him resulted in his becoming one of our most modern architects, and at the same time maintaining perfection in the quality of his work. The great examples of his executed work are deserving of the most careful study. These include the Federal Reserve Building, the Rodin Museum, the Delaware River Bridge, and the Valley Forge Memorial Arch, all in Philadelphia; the Folger Shakespearean Library, the Central Heating Plant, the Federal Reserve Board Building, and the Calvert Street Bridge in Washington, and the Detroit Art Museum. In them all will be found a distinguished, almost exquisite sense of fitness. He knew how to give quiet dignity and opulence to his banks; grandeur to the Federal Reserve Buildings, an emotional quality to his bridges; and serenity and a quality of everlastingness to his monuments. Besides this fitness to their purpose, his buildings had a vitality that was stimulating not only to other designers and architects, but to the average layman as well. Their richness of effect was in no small part due to his mastery of the third dimension of depth.

His work was nowhere more appreciated than by his peers. In 1927 he was awarded the medal of honor of the Philadelphia Chapter, in 1928 the gold medal of the New York Architectural League, and in 1938 the medal of honor of the American Institute of Architects. Honorary degrees were conferred on him by the University of Pennsylvania and Brown; and from Harvard he received the degree of Doctor of Arts. Although his upbringing was typically French, and he came to this country with scant knowledge of our language, he absorbed so well the American ways and ideals that he became one of us in spirit and in fact. His writings on architectural subjects were clear and forceful, for he was endowed like many of his countrymen with a clear and logical mind which showed itself in his work and carried conviction to his clients.

Cret's natural ability as a critic was recognized in 1911, when he was made one of the charter members of Philadelphia's Art Jury, on which he served continuously, his latter years as its President. Later he was appointed to the Pennsylvania Art Commission, and finally was appointed to the National Commission of Fine Arts by President Roosevelt. As a member of these and other commissions and juries, for the demand on him for this type of service was constant, his capacity for rapid and accurate judgment was extraordinary, and was depended on by his colleagues. At the end of a jury meeting, if a citation had to be composed or a difficult report framed, it was Paul Cret to whom the others naturally turned. Renowned engineers with whom he frequently collaborated on many varied problems, from bridges to streamlined trains, agreed that he had one of the clearest minds of anyone with whom they had worked, and especially admired his grasp of complicated problems and the logic and sureness of his judgment in difficult situations.

His full and productive career up to the time of his death is remarkable when the handicaps under which he labored are considered. Early in his career his hearing was impaired, and later, due to an operation, he lost his voice. But his courage never failed him. He did not retreat, as most men would have done, into his shell. His eyes kept their sparkle; and conversations carried on with pad and pencil, in which his wit, humor, and sometimes caustic comment were given free rein, were the delight of his friends and associates. He was an intensely vital person who loved an encounter of wits in a conversation with a friend as much as a competition in design, where he rejoiced as a giant to run his course.

He was a noble and courageous character, a fine spirit, a distinguished artist, and an Academician who brought us honor and of whom we shall always be proud.