(b Istanbul, 21 Nov 1900; d Antibes, 29 Oct 1970). American architect of Armenian birth. After studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, he worked for a time with Josef Hoffmann and Oskar Strnad. He went to live in Paris in 1920 and became an important colleague of Robert Mallet-Stevens. His first projects included a design for a concrete villa on pilotis, which Siegfried Giedion considered a forerunner of Le Corbusier's Villa Laroche, and which confirmed him to be an exponent of functionalism, favouring concrete, geometric volumes and smooth walls. He gained public recognition with his designs for Sonia Delaunay's Boutique Simultan?e and the Cubist garden at the Exposition Internationale des Arts D?coratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925. This led to the commission for the garden of the villa for Vicomte Charles de Noailles at Hy?res. In 1926, while working on Robert Mallet-Stevens's Rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris, he set up his own firm and worked on a variety of projects for villas and large houses in the Paris area and on the C?te d'Azur. The widely publicized villa that he built for the couturier Jacques Heim at Neuilly (1927) marked him as one of the most notable architect-designers in Paris. Although far from being a theorist, he was associated with the Union des Artistes Modernes and with CIAM, and Le Corbusier appointed him Secretary-General of CIAM at the La Sarraz Congress in 1928 (see CIAM, fig. 1). He built two houses at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Vienna in 1932. In 1933 he went to live in Teheran where the Shah appointed him City Architect and Planner. With c. 20 private villas and important public projects, he contributed to Teheran's image as a modern capital without giving up his traditional practice. Personal reasons led him to move to London in 1937 where he worked with Connell, Ward and Lucas, but World War II prevented their projects being realized, and he returned to Paris. At the Liberation he worked on the reconstruction of Saarbr?cken with Georges-Henri Pingusson and taught at the school of architecture there. Through his former fellow-students from Vienna who were by this time expatriates in the USA, he became a professor at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1948 and from 1949 to 1969 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thereafter, apart from several competition entries, he gave up practising as an architect.
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