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Pierre-Adrien Pâris


Pierre-Adrien Pâris (1745 - 1 August 1819) was a French architect, painter and designer.

Pâris was born at Besançon, the son of an architect and official surveyor at the court of the Prince-Bishop of Basel. He went to Paris to study architecture in 1760; there he was particularly a student of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Louis-François Trouard at the École royale d'architecture. After failing three times to win the Prix de Rome, he visited Rome in 1769 to accompany his teacher's son as his tutor, and, at the recommendation of the grand connoisseur, Louis Marie Augustin, duc d'Aumont, was permitted to follow courses at the French Academy in Rome. He traveled in Italy, including visits to the Roman ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Paestum, of which he made many drawings and casts. He returned to France in 1774.

In 1775, Trouard entrusted him with the interior decoration of the Hôtel d'Aumont he was building in Place de la Concorde. In 1778, at the death of Michel-Ange Challe, Louis XVI appointed him King's Designer and Architect ("Dessinateur du Cabinet du Roi"). He worked on numerous decorative schemes for official events, theatrical performances and funerals, and also directed the decoration of the Paris Opera.

Appointed to the Académie royale d'architecture in 1780, from 1784 to 1790 he directed the construction of the magnificent town hall in Neuchâtel (Switzerland). In 1785, he built the Hôtel Depont des Granges in La Rochelle. Starting in 1787, for the Duchess of Bourbon, he worked on the interior layout of the Palais de l'Elysée, which virtually eliminated the scheme by his master Boullée, and also redesigned the English garden and built the group of cottages there called "hameau de Chantilly", which imitated garden folly built at Chantilly by the Prince de Condé. He rearranged the buildings and created the English garden of the Abbey of Valasse at Gruchet-le-Valasse (Seine). He also carried out a major neoclassical reconstruction project at the Château de Porrentruy.


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