Louis Bourgeois (architect)

Louis Bourgeois
Bahá'í House of Worship, Wilmette, United States
Born	March 19, 1856 St. Célestin de Nicolet, Canada East
Died	August 20, 1930(1930-08-20) (aged 74) Wilmette, Illinois, United States
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	architect

Jean-Baptiste Louis Bourgeois (March 19, 1856 – August 20, 1930) was a Canadian architect, active in Canada and the United States.

In his youth, Louis Bourgeois worked as a clerk in a church contractor's office in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Through this experience planned the construction of the Church of Saint-Wenceslas in 1892. He married Marie Gronville, who after having their three children, died young. His wife's medical bills caused him to go into debt, and thus he moved to Montreal to work as an apprentice sculptor to Napoléon Bourassa. Bourassa sent Bourgeois to Paris to study sculpture, but he left his studies and travelled to other countries including Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Persia.

He returned to North America in 1896, to Chicago where he worked with innovative architect Louis Sullivan. Within several years he moved to Southern California, where he designed a landmark residence in the Mission Revival style, in central Hollywood for the popular still life painter Paul de Longpré. The 1898 house at Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga, with an art gallery to sell de Longpré paintings and surrounded by the expansive "Le Roi de Fleur" gardens, became a tourist destination on a P.E. Redcars line. Bourgeois also taught French to de Longpré's daughters, and married one of them, Alice.

By the Winter of 1906 Bourgeois and his wife had joined the Bahá'í Faith after having "come into association with the Baha'i Faith through Marie Watson and Mary Hanford Ford,"(then of the Boston Bahá'í community.) The Bahá'í teaching on the unity of religions was also important to him. When he was in New York City, Bourgeois joined the community there but then soon moved to Teaneck, New Jersey to expand the Bahá'í community there.