Lavirotte Building

The Lavirotte Building, an apartment building at 29 Avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France, was designed by the architect Jules Lavirotte and built between 1899 and 1901. The facade is lavishly decorated with sculpture and ceramic tiles made by the ceramics manufacturer Alexandre Bigot. Lavirotte was awarded the prize for the most original new facade in the 7th arrondissement in 1901, and the building today is one of the best-known surviving examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Paris.

The architect, Jules Lavirotte, had already built two buildings in the same neighborhood of the 7th arrondissement; a private residence at 12 Rue Sédillot (now a school) and an apartment building at 3 Square Rapp, where he had his own apartment on the fifth floor. Both of these buildings had some of the fantasy and art nouveau elements for which Lavirotte was famous, but none were as exuberant as the new building. Some sources, including the Base Mérimée, the official list of French historic monuments, state that the building was owned by Alexandre Bigot, a chemistry professor turned entrepreneur who was the first in France to manufacture glazed ceramic tiles, an ancient technique he borrowed from China. However, the construction permit shows the building was owned by Lavirotte and Charles Combes, and there is no evidence that Bigot ever lived there. Nonetheless, the building did become a very effective showcase of the glazed earthenware tiles that he developed, which were later used in other notable Art Nouveau buildings. The ceramic tiles and sculpture turned the building into a work of art, a large piece of sculpture.

Lavirotte used several innovations in the construction of the building. Some of the walls were built with an early form of reinforced concrete; The bricks were hollow; once they were put n place, metal wires rods were run through them to secure them and then they were filled with concrete. In addition, Lavirotte built the walls in two layers with an air space between, to provide more effective soundproofing.

A team of craftsmen was responsible for the construction and decoration; The ironwork was made by Dondelinger; the sculptural decoration, designed by Lavirotte, was done by Théobald-Joseph Sporrer, Firmin Michelet and Alfred-Jean Halou. The sculpture around the front doorway was by Jean-Baptiste Larrivé.

The Lavirotte building was listed as an historic monument in 1964.

Like his contemporary, Hector Guimard, Lavirotte was catapulted to fame when the building was a winner in the Paris competition of new facades of 1901. The competition had been created to encourage Paris architects to break away from the model for apartment buildings created by Georges-Eugene Haussmann during the reign of Napoléon III, which later critics found monotonous. In giving the award to Lavirotte, the jury declared, "the ensemble of the facade, which produces a very agreeable effect, certainly contributes to the decoration of the grand boulevard on which it is constructed. Lavirotte won the prize two more times, for the Ceramic Hotel in 1905.

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