World Architecture Images- Le Parisien Offices

part of the essential architecture network

	Essential Architecture- Paris Le Parisien Offices now the head office of France Cable Radio (France Télécom group)
architect	G. P. Chedanne
location	Rue Réaumur, No. 124 (Métro Réaumur Sébastopole).
date	1903
style	Early Modern
construction	riveted iron frame
type	Office Building


Rue Réaumur, No. 124, shown above, is a great modern building designed by Georges Chédanne in 1905. Except for its upper portion, the facade of this building consists entirely of glass and riveted metal, allowing the architect to develop a design of striking originality. Chédanne's authorship, has sometimes been contested because he also designed buildings in a more conventional classical idiom, but these doubts would seem to be unjustified. The building has long housed the offices of the newspaper Le Parisien libéré. Text and illustration quoted from- "Paris, Buildings and Monuments" An Illustrated Guide with over 850 Drawings and Neighborhood Maps. By Michael Poisson. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 463 pp, 1999.
"Le Parisien confronted the street with a riveted- and plated-steel facade in which a dialogue was established not only between the load-bearing elements and the non-load-bearing fenestration with its corrugated-steel sheet spandrels, but also between the primary and secondary systems of vertical support. The primary system carries the spandrels according to an evident Palladian order of A:B:A:B:A:B:A, while a secondary system picks up the arrises of the bay windows on the top floor and conducts these loads back to the paired columns at the ground. As recent commentators have remarked, the plastic quality of this structural system anticipates in some respects the gigantic megastructural works which have recently emerged from in America from the school of Mies van der Rohe." — from Kenneth Frampton and Yukio Futagawa. Modern Architecture 1851-1945. p118.
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