Eugène Hénard

Eugène Hénard (* 1849 ; † 1923 ) was a French architect and visionary urban planner.

Life

He graduated in 1880 from the Paris École des Beaux-Arts , where his father was already professor of architecture, and entered the service of the Paris Office for Public Works in 1882, where he completed his entire professional life. Hénard only occasionally emerged as an architect, for example with buildings for the two Paris World Exhibitions in 1889 and 1900 - for the latter, he created the much acclaimed Palais des Illusions, the scaled-down replica of which can still be found in the Musée Grévin today. Hénard's main field of activity, however, was urban planning. In 1903 his study “Etudes sur les transformations de Paris” appeared, in which he compared the development tendencies of the French metropolis with big cities like London , Berlin , Moscow and Vienna . Hénard is also considered to be one of the fathers of the roundabout (with a suggestion from 1906) . Hénard was very interested in improving and expanding the Parisian green spaces . For this reason, he proposed the creation of a series of large parks on the site of the obsolete Paris city ​​fortifications of the 1840s (de facto, however, the Boulevard périphérique , an urban motorway , was later created there ). Hénard's contribution “The Cities of the Future” to the London urban planning conference of 1910 contains visionary ideas about the future, including private transport by air.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugène Hénard in the catalog of the German National Library
• THE CITIES OF THE FUTURE. Eugène Hénard on the Cornell University website