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Hector Guimard had a commitment to sharing beautiful, sensuous, accessible designs for both civic architecture and everyday objects with a wide audience, and his use of mass production technologies resonates with current concerns about accessibility, affordability, and sustainability. Convening an international group of speakers, this forum will highlight new research that reexamines Hector Guimard’s legacy in the context of his wife’s significant contributions and his own prescient ideas about designing for home and community.

This forum is held in partnership with the Alliance Française of Chicago and is being held at the auditorium of the Alliance Française of Chicago at 54 W. Chicago Avenue.

Schedule:

10:15-12:00 AM

Exhibition co-curator David A. Hanks, discussing the collecting history of Guimard, especially in the United States
Co-curator Sarah Coffin, on Adeline Guimard’s work, and how she helped enshrine her husband’s legacy
Nicolas Horiot, architect and Président du Cercle Guimard, to discuss The Cercle Guimard’s efforts to create a Guimard museum

12:00-1:30 PM

Break

1:30-2:30 PM

University of Chicago Professor Leora Auslander on the unique qualities of Hector Guimard’s orthodox synagogue

2:45 – 4:00 PM

Isabelle Gournay on housing typologies in the Auteuil district during Guimard’s lifetime and today
Columbia University professor Barry Bergdoll on Guimard’s standardized and mass-operational housing projects

4:00-5:00

Reception

**The schedule is subject to change. Check back often for updates.

About the Speakers:

Leora Auslander is Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization in the College and Professor in the departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History at the University of Chicago. The primary national focus of her research is modern France, but she investigates research problems best treated transnationally. She teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social and cultural history with a focus on France and Germany; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment; Jewish history; gender history and theory; race in the Atlantic world; colonial and postcolonial Europe.

Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. Professor Bergdoll’s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. In exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator from 2007 to 2013, Bergdoll has offered a series of exhibitions intended to offer more inclusive visions of subjects from Mies van der Rohe (and his relationship to garden reform and landscape), the Bauhaus, Henri Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Latin American post-war architecture, and most recently Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sarah Coffin is an Independent Consultant, Curator, Lecturer, and Decorative Arts and Architectural Historian who retired as Senior Curator and Head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Prior to Cooper Hewitt, she was a Vice President specialist at Sotheby’s becoming the firm’s Decorative Arts Representative in addition to cataloguing. Earlier professional roles were at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a curatorial researcher in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, fellow in the Met’s American Wing, researcher in the Furniture Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and, while a student, assistant in the American Arts department of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Isabelle Gournay (Emerita – University of Maryland) received a professional degree in architecture from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a certificate of museum training from the Ecole du Louvre and a doctorate in art history from Yale University. Her major area of research and publications – including Paris on the Potomac, The French Influence on the Architecture and Art of Washington, D.C. (2007)—have focused on cross currents between France and the United States, and her new book projects study “Beaux-Arts architects” in US and Canadian societies, and Washington, D.C.’s Townsend House, designed by Carrere and Hastings. She co-edited Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

David A. Hanks has extensive experience in the museum field, including curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Recent exhibition projects include Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Richard H. Driehaus Collection (2013), Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson (2016) and Hector Guimard: Art Nouveau to Modernism, which opened at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, in 2022. As Curator for The Stewart Program for Modern Design and its international design collection, his recent focus has been on creating the Designed by Women website, developed in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Nicolas Horiot is an architect and Président du Cercle Guimard.

The Driehaus Museum is a cultural partner of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Official Website

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Tags: auditorium of the Alliance Française of Chicago, Barry Bergdoll, Chicago, David A. Hanks, Hector Guimard’s Designs for Living: A Forum for New Research & Ideas, Isabelle Gournay, Leora Auslander, Near North Side, Nicolas Horiot, Sarah Coffin