André Lurçat

Who was André Lurçat?

André Lurçat was a French modernist architect, landscape architect, furniture designer, city planner, and founding member of CIAM. He was active in the rebuilding in French cities after World War II. He was the brother of visual artist Jean Lurçat.

Lurçat was born in Bruyères, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, worked in the office of Robert Mallet-Stevens, began building a series of houses in the 1920s, and became interested in the principles of social housing to address the French housing crisis between the wars. In 1928 he was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. Along with Adolf Loos, Richard Neutra, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and others, he demonstrated a family residence at the Vienna Werkbund exhibition of 1932, produced his best-known villa Hefferlin at Ville-d'Avray, then went to Moscow to work for the Soviet government from 1934 to 1937.

Lurçat is known for advancing the cause of modernism in landscape architecture; he took a position, contrary to the proponents of Existenzminimum, that all social housing must include gardens. He is also known for his planned postwar reconstruction of the French city of Maubeuge.