Henri Prost

(Léon) Henri Prost (born February 25, 1874 in Paris ; † July 16, 1959 there ) was a French architect and town planner . Its main areas of activity were the Paris area, Casablanca , the Moroccan coast and Istanbul . As early as the 1920s, Prost warned of the disastrous consequences of the destruction of the landscape through unbridled building activity.

education

Prost studied at the École Spéciale d'Architecture (of which he would later become director) and the École des Beaux-Arts , both in Paris. He was a student of Marcel Lambert . In 1902 he won the Prix ​​de Rome ( Rome Prize) for designing a national printing house. In 1910 he received first prize in the competition for the reorganization of the infrastructure of Antwerp . In 1911 he worked on a comparable task for Paris together with Eugène Alfred Hénard and Alfred Agache ; his concept linked the outer areas of the city with the center through a system of streets and green corridors.

Act

Prost's first work in the oriental area was a renovation concept for Hagia Sophia . In 1913, Prost was invited by Hubert Lyautey to do urban planning in Morocco. For Casablanca he designed a port on a drained area and a representative street in the style of La Canebière in Marseille . He also carried out planning along numerous locations on the Moroccan coast.

In 1936 Prost accepted an invitation to Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , who commissioned him with the general plan for Istanbul. After two years of analysis, he designed new buildings, streets, bridges, squares and green spaces. He tried to maintain the social structure of the old town district centers. He had the Topçu barracks and the Taksim stadium demolished for Gezi Park in the Beyoğlu district . He kept lines of sight to the Golden Horn and the Bosporus clear. Prost's stay in Turkey lasted until 1951.

Prost taught at the Institute d'Urbanisme at Paris University. He helped found the Société française des urbanistes .

Selected works

• 1917–1922: plans for Casablanca
• 1914–1922: Urban development plans for Fès , Marrakech , Meknes and Rabat
• 1922: Regional planning in the Var department
• 1928–1935: Urban development project in the Île-de-France region (with Remaury Pierre and Jean Royer )
• 1928–1939: Regional plan for Greater Paris
• 1928–1930: City planning in Metz
• 1932–1939: Urban planning in Algiers
• 1936–1951: Urban planning in the center of Istanbul

Awards

• 1902: Grand Prix de Rome
• 1910: First prize in the international urban development competition for the planning of Antwerp
• 1911: Medal of Honor from the Salon des artistes français
• 1933: Member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts
• Orders: Legion of Honor (Commandeur), Palmes Académiques , Arts et letters

literature

• Who's who in France. Dictionnaire biographique 1959–1960 . 4th edition. Jacques Lafitte, Paris 1959, p. 2160; 5th edition, p. 188.
• Cheers, Henri. In: The dictionary of art. Edited by Jane Turner. Volume 25. Macmillan, London 1996. ISBN 1-884446-00-0 ; Pp. 658-659.
• Laurent Hodebert: Henri Prost 1874-1959. In: Créateurs de jardins et de paysages en France de la Renaissance au XXIe siècle, edited by Michel Racine. Volume 2. Actes Sud, Arles 2002, ISBN 2-7427-3721-9 , pp. 170-173.

Web link

• Archive on Henri Prost in the Académie d'architecture (Paris)