Paul P. Cret

Paul Philippe Cret (October 24, 1876 – September 8, 1945) was a French-born Philadelphia architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he taught a design studio in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Lyon, France, Cret was educated at that city's École des Beaux-Arts, then in Paris, where he studied at the Atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal. He came to the United States in 1903 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Although settled in America, he happened to be in France at the outbreak of World War I. He enlisted and remained in the French army for the duration, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and made an officer in the Legion of Honor.

Cret's practice in America began in 1907. His first major commission, designed with Albert Kelsey, was the Pan American Union Building (the headquarters of what is now the Organization of American States) in Washington DC (1908–10), a breakthrough that led to many war memorials, civic buildings, court houses, and other solid, official structures.

His work through the 1920s was firmly in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but with the radically simplified classical form of the Folger Shakespeare Library (1929–32), he flexibly adopted and applied monumental classical traditions to modernist innovations. Some of Cret's work is remarkably streamlined and forward-thinking, and includes collaborations with sculptors such as Alfred Bottiau and Leon Hermant. In the late 1920s the architect was brought in as design consultant on Fellheimer and Wagner's Cincinnati Union Terminal (1929–33), the high-water mark of Art Deco style in the United States. He became an American citizen in 1927.

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