Olivier CinqualbrePaul Nelson, Architecte inventeur

“Presentation of the work of P. Nelson. Discovering France during the First World War, he continued his architectural training there between 1920 and 1927 and stayed until 1940. A specialist in prefabrication and hospital architecture, he actively participated in the reconstruction after the Second World War, notably with the Saint-Lô hospital. With unpublished archives.

Trained at the Beaux-Arts and influenced by his master Auguste Perret, author of projects that gave rise to books rather than buildings, Paul Nelson (Chicago, 1895-Marseille, 1979) was a functionalist architect but above all a humanist: an inventor of architecture. He introduced American techniques to Europe and taught on both sides of the Atlantic. Specialising in hospital architecture, he designed the France-US memorial hospital in Saint-Lô, an emblematic monument of the Reconstruction, and the hospital centres in Dinan and Arles. His exchanges with the artists of his time, to whom he was close – Joan Miró, Georges Braque, for whom he built a studio in Varengeville, Alexander Calder and Fernand Léger, for whom he designed a museum – generated a dynamic that renewed his apprehension of space: his Maison suspendue (Hanging House) is an architectural manifesto. The exhibition and the accompanying book present the architect and inventor from the extensive archive deposited at the Centre Pompidou.”