Perret’s best houses, such as the Mouron house at Versailles of 1926 or the Nubar house in the Rue du 19 Janvier at Garches of 1930, have an almost eighteenth-century dignity and serenity. The ‘stripped-Classical’ apparatus of terminal cornices, encadrements around the openings, and occasional free-standing columns is doubtless logical as an expression of the construction, but it is also very conservative in effect. Yet the ferro-concrete construction encouraged Perret to introduce very wide openings leading out on to surrounding terraces and to open up the main living areas even more than he had done in the flats of 1902-3 in the Rue Franklin. Such treatments were still rather advanced for Europe, however common they may have been in America for a quarter of a century and more. The characteristic quality of Perret’s domestic work is seen at its best in a small block of flats at 9 Place de la Porte de Passy in Paris facing the Bois de Boulogne that he built in 1930 (Plate [139B]). This has a façade towards the park so superbly proportioned that it might almost be by Schinkel and a flow of space inside the individual flats that is worthy of Wright, although much more formal in organization.
Now Perret began to receive the official commissions that are generally given in France only to men well on in years. The building designed in 1929 that he erected for the technical services of the Ministry of Marine in the Boulevard Victor in Paris is one of the largest and most typical of his later works (Plate [140B]). The complex rhythms and subtle three-dimensional play of this façade are entirely produced by the actual structural elements. The skeleton divides the long façades into a series of horizontal panels within which are set the vertical frames of the windows separated by pre-cast slabs; in one storey the windows even extend the full width of the bays.
To a considerable extent Perret had succeeded in achieving what he had long consciously sought, that is, a vocabulary of design in concrete as direct, as expressive, and as ordered as the masonry vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a style Louis XX, so to say—still very French in a quite traditional way, yet unmistakably of this century. In the Garde Meuble or National Furniture Storehouse in the Rue Croulebarbe in Paris, begun the next year, the vocabulary is—from principle—all but identical; yet fewer windows and more solid panels were necessary here so that the general effect is flatter and blanker. The curved colonnade across the open side of the court is almost archaeologically reminiscent of the eighteenth century, despite the breadth of its spans and the ingenuity of its detailing. The small concert hall of 1929 in the Rue Cardinet for the École Normale de Musique is less pretentious but also less impressive.
Concrete to Perret, after all these years of employing it, was not a crude or a substitute material. By the use of coloured aggregates which he found various means of exposing he was able to vary the texture and colour of his poured and pre-cast elements with considerable subtlety and elegance. In the later buildings the workmanship is usually of the highest quality—it was by no means so in the early twenties—with arrises brought to a sharp edge in pure cement and such classicizing details as the flute-like facets on piers and the capital-like treatment of their tops carried to a finish comparable to that of chisel-cut freestone.
Thus Perret was eventually able to avoid the industrial brutality of much work in concrete where the material is left as it comes from rough timber forms with crumbling arrises and pockmarked surfaces. Such lack of finish is acceptable in large-scale engineering work but certainly awkward when seen close to as in Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. On the other hand, Perret kept well away also from that slickness of surface—especially popular with younger architects in the twenties—that is produced when concrete is covered with a smooth stucco rendering and painted.[[401]] Such slickness is, of course, generally very soon lost as the original surface grows cracked and stained; only too rarely is it properly maintained by frequent patching and repainting. Concrete was to Perret a worthy material, like stone, and therefore deserved the effort and the cost required to give it an expressive finish requiring little or no maintenance.
The reticulated wall system of the big government buildings was also used for a block of flats at 51-55 Rue Raynouard, built in 1932, where Perret himself lived and also maintained his atelier. The necessary adaptation of his formalized open planning to a trapezoidal site produced suites of interior space of considerable complexity yet perfect orderliness. Though Perret was still without a governmental diploma, the atelier[[402]] he ran here was associated with the École des Beaux-Arts. It almost seemed now as if he wished to demonstrate how much truer a representative he was of real French tradition than those who were its official, though unworthy, custodians. Thus the older he grew the farther his work drew away from that of the more revolutionary modern architects of the second generation. By 1930 it had definitely begun to date; yet it was only in the last twenty-five years of his life that there came to him the greatest opportunities of realizing his ambitions for French twentieth-century architecture.
In comparison with Perret’s own pioneering of 1902-22 his late work seems to lack vitality. For all the thought that went into its finish, for all the virtuosity of certain features—such as the self-supporting curve of the broad stair that spirals down into his atelier in the Rue Raynouard—his very ambition to create a new French tradition gave his later buildings something of the banality of those designed by the more conventionally ‘traditional’ architects of his generation. This applies in particular to his principal work of the thirties in Paris, the still unfinished Musée des Travaux-Publics in the Avenue du Président-Wilson which he began in 1937. Here the ingeniously pseudo-Classical—yet also truly structural—apparatus of external engaged columns and the intricate plan spreading out from a circular auditorium at the apex of the site are quite in the Beaux-Arts manner. But the grandeur of scale in the interiors and the exciting upward sweep of the boldly curving stairs lend value, and even novelty, to a scheme that is in many ways extremely conservative.
After the Second World War Perret was asked to provide plans for the rebuilding of several bombed cities: Le Havre in 1945; Amiens in 1947; and the Vieux-Port district of Marseilles in 1951. For Amiens he designed a skyscraper, long physically complete but still unoccupied, that derives more from his decorative Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble than from the skyscrapers of the New World. This is one of his few complete failures, if for no other reason than the competition its tall and awkward silhouette offers to the cathedral, whose towers had so long dominated the city’s skyline. The executed Marseilles buildings are not of his design any more than are most of those at Amiens.
At Le Havre, however, his control of the rebuilding was more complete. The Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, or at least the three sides completed between 1948 and 1950 by his associates, outweighs by a great deal the failure of the Amiens skyscraper (Plate [140A]). Ranges of four-storey buildings, all carried out in the reticulated vocabulary of his Government buildings of the early thirties in Paris, surround a large sunken plaza; the Hôtel de Ville in the near-Beaux-Arts manner of his Musée des Travaux Publics occupies the fourth side. Shops open towards the square under a continuous colonnade. Behind, rising out of small courts, are taller towers occupied by flats; these lend great three-dimensional interest to the formal and absolutely symmetrical layout of this section of the rebuilt quarter. Since his death similar ranges of buildings have been carried out along the quais to the south. On the whole the extensive work of the team[[403]] is superior to the public monuments by their captain, the Hôtel de Ville and the church of St Joseph, both designed in 1950 and completed before Perret’s death in 1954.
Impressive as is Perret’s Le Havre in the international roster of post-war urban rebuilding, it seems curiously out of date today, a mere realization in the 1940s and 1950s, one might almost say, of the aspirations of the early decades of the century. Since that period had few such opportunities as was Perret’s here to realize urbanism on this scale, however, what he accomplished there is a welcome addition to the city-building achievements of this century.