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machine production was not the point, it was just the most effective way to produce the panels at a reasonable cost. Indeed Guimard’s panels were not standard-issue productions, but were carefully designed by him, and then produced in limited quantities as necessary for his building designs (but no one else’s). Indeed one of the ways in which Guimard’s designs for the Métro are interesting is that, despite their striking originality, they are all virtually the same, and clearly the entrances to the underground transport system were imagined as a ‘type’, rather than as unique individual creations. While Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe made it clear that they were interested in developing new types of dwelling, and steel-framed buildings, one associates Guimard’s idiosyncratic forms less readily with a rationalist programme of building production. Nevertheless it is plain that these buildings were as efficient and as rational as the transport system they led down to, even though that is not what the building expresses.

21. Métro entrance surrounds, Paris, France (1899–1905); architect: Hector Guimard (1867–1942). The first line of the Paris Métro opened on 19 July 1900, and from the outset was entered by way of the portals that Hector Guimard designed for them as a young man – he was 32 years old when he was given the commission. He had visited Brussels and seen Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1892), which had translated the fashionable Art Nouveau style into architecture. In the Métro stations, Guimard translated the style into prefabricated cast iron, and the portals would appear in their neighbourhoods with great rapidity, so that they seemed to have erupted from under ground overnight. Some of the portals had glass canopies, others did not, but they used standardized parts. There was an outcry in the press when these buildings appeared, and after the vogue for the Art Nouveau had passed, the portals were removed rather than repaired. Between 1927 and 1962 all but two of the original stations were dismantled, the remaining ones being at the Porte Dauphine and Abbesses. Many of them have now been replaced with reproductions.

The artistic vision seems to be that the Métro is a sensuous dreamworld, and it certainly has an air of being set apart from normal life as we know it above pavement level. A journey on the Métro is framed as a descent to the underworld, from which we return like Orpheus. That does not stop it being a practical transport system, but the practicality is not what the architecture expresses, whereas by contrast Norman Foster’s design for the Bilbao subway system makes it as rational as possible, trying to conserve the passengers’ sense of direction on approaching the underground platforms, by having very direct links from the pavement, turning few corners on the way. By contrast the Paris Métro has labyrinthine passages that connect its lines, and the traveller is certainly in limbo, which further enhances the associations with the unconscious and perhaps accounts for the fact that it keeps playing a role in Parisian narratives, from Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau (1959), to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux déstin d’Amélie Poulain (2001).

Back to basics

For the avant-garde architects of Guimard’s generation, nature was the usual starting point. In Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced intense flower drawings and landscapes, while his architectural work made use of sinuous lines and geometric figures. In Chicago Frank Lloyd Wright developed his ‘prairie house’ type, with wide overhanging eaves, that was supposed to echo the wide flat horizons of the prairies, though the buildings themselves were in the Chicago suburbs. In Barcelona Antoni Gaudí developed his own highly idiosyncratic way of dealing with buildings, studying bones and beehives along the way. The most ambitious of his buildings was the church of the Sagrada Familia, with its strange stalagmite towers, which he left incomplete at his death (Figure 22). They were all trying to reinvent architecture from first principles,