The Apartment Building at 25 bis Rue Benjamin Franklin, Paris France, built 1904 by Auguste Perret.
Auguste Perret was one of the very first architects to give a modern architectural expression to reinforced concrete. The beams and columns were visible, and the masonry was given a different finish to differentiate it from the concrete. The building features a simple concrete frame structure, which eliminated load-bearing walls and, for the first time, showed the potential of concrete structures for creating open interior spaces.
Perret built what is surely the first apartment buildign with a reinforced concrete structure. It is an eight-story structure, built on a shallow site, which made it impossible to have an interior patio, so direct lighting could only be taken from the street.
Perret then projects a U-shaped floor plan, and in the recessed central part fits two balconies at 45 degrees, thus increasing the façade surface to solve the direct lighting of the interior spaces. In addition to the staircase and the services, the standard floor plan presents sections, as many as determined by the treatment of the walls described. These premises can be modified in number and shape, thanks to the arrangement of the columns, simply by disposing the partitions that separate them in another way. The architect thus achieves an open floor plan despite the narrowness of the available surface.
Of the different readings that can be made of this building, it is worth highlighting: an articulation of the expressive and distributive values of the work around the concrete structure; removal of the walls on the ground floor; the variation in height of the building (after five floors of uniform elevation, the upper ones are set back with two levels of attics and a roof terrace); the establishment of the linear rhythm through the structural elements of reinforced concrete; the ceramic cladding, which on the beams and supports is made of smooth strips, while on the panels it has floral motifs, with which the load-bearing structure of the supported part of the building is articulated; the predominance of the openings over the structural frame allowing natural light to all the spaces; the floor layout of the pilasters that allows maximum use and greater freedom of internal spaces.
The rectangular frame allows for roof terraces on setbacks of the upper apartments. U-shaped front façade inspired by statutory light courts at the rear of Parisian apartment buildings. The trabeated, rectangular concrete frame throughout the building is not exposed directly but by the plain tiles on the facade. The non-weight bearing walls are expressed as slightly recessed infill panels of floral-patterned ceramic tiles.
Glazed openings are as large as local zoning laws allowed. The concrete frame allows for thin wall partitions and maximum interior space. At the sixth-floor apartment a reinforced concrete frame breaks free of the wall surface
One of his greatest contributions to the modern architectural language is that of having defined with absolute clarity the relationships between support and supported elements, as well as having experimented with solutions and elements that will be the common heritage of today’s architectural language.
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25 bis Rue Benjamin Franklin by Auguste Perret | Architecture Enthusiast |
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Aretes by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
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