Robert Mallet

Irish industrialist and seismologist (1810–1881)

After graduating from Trinity College in his native city of Dublin in 1830, Mallet joined his father's foundry business. He remained there until 1861 when, with the completion of the Irish railroad network, there was such a marked decline in his business that he moved to London as a consultant engineer. Mallet was an engineer of some skill; he constructed several bridges, the Fastnet Lighthouse, and erected the 133-ton roof of St. George's in Dublin.

As a geologist he is mainly remembered for pioneering observational and experimental seismology. In 1857 he spent two months in Naples studying the effects of the recent earthquake. He showed that by noting the direction of cracks in walls and the arrangement of fallen masonry, it was possible to determine the epicenter and the depth of the earthquake. His results were published in The Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: the First Principles of Observational Cosmology (1862).

In a series of experiments starting in 1850, Mallet attempted to determine the speed of earthquake waves. He did this by setting off small explosives at different depths in different soils and measuring the time taken for the seismic waves to travel varying distances. James Michel, working in the 18th century, had estimated a speed of 20 miles (32 km) per minute but this could not compare with Mallet's precise measurements.

(b Paris, 24 March 1886; d Paris, 8 Feb 1945). French architect, designer and writer. His father, Maurice Mallet, was an important paintings dealer and appraiser, and one of the first to promote the work of Impressionist painters. While studying at the Ecole Sp?ciale d'Architecture in Paris (1903-6), Robert Mallet-Stevens frequently visited his family in Brussels, where he observed the construction of the Palais Stoclet (1905-11), designed by Josef Hoffmann for Mallet-Stevens's uncle, Baron Stoclet. Hoffmann's influence can be seen in Mallet-Stevens's earliest designs for villas such as the Ecorcheville house (1914; 2nd version, Paris, Mus. A. D?c.). The graphic style of the villa design, the smooth white fa?ades and rigorous geometry of the masses were derived from the Palais Stoclet. Mallet-Stevens's series of drawings for city buildings (1917) were similar in style and were published as Une Cit? moderne (1922). His villa at Hy?res (1923-6; see FRANCE, fig. 14) for Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, revealed a style that had been influenced by contact with the De Stijl group. Simple prisms project laterally, in a series of terraces, from a central staircase that acts as the vertical counter-weight to the composition. Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Jozseph Czaky and Constantin Brancusi were chosen by Mallet-Stevens to provide the bas-reliefs and other sculptures for the villa. In 1928 the villa was used as the film set for Les Myst?res du ch?teau du d? by Man Ray.

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A leading French architect, designer, and writer connected with progressive design in the interwar years, Mallet-Stevens studied at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris from 1903 to 1906. An important influence was the Palais Stoclet (1905-11) in Brussels, designed by Josef Hoffmann for Mallet-Stevens's uncle. Such an outlook was evident in the geometric underpinning of Mallet-Stevens's designs for the Écorcheville house (1914), his 1917 drawings for city buildings, and the 32 plates of city buildings in his publication of Une Cité Moderne (1922). Mallet-Stevens also participated in the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, for which he designed the Pavilion of the French Embassy. His commission for the Noailles Villa (1923-6) at Hyères, for which he also designed furniture, revealed the influence of De Stijl. During the 1920s Mallet-Stevens designed a number of film set designs including those for Marcel l'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (1923-4) and Le Vertige (1926). For the former, he was responsible for the exterior architectural sets including the De Stijl-influenced engineer's villa. Other designers involved included René Lalique and Jean Puiforcat who designed objects, Fernand Léger who was involved with the engineer's workshop, and Paul Poiret who contributed a number of the costumes. Mallet-Stevens also designed for Man Ray's film set for Les Mysteres du Château du Dé (1928), the latter based on the Noailles Villa. He carried out many other commissions for houses, the most significant being the complex of five private villas in the Rue Mallet-Stevens at Auteuil built between 1926 and 1927. It included his own house and practice, with stained glass by Louis Barillet and metalwork by Jean Prouvé, who had also carried out metalwork for shop front designs for Mallet-Stevens. Barillet also worked on decorative glass for Mallet-Stevens's La Semaine à Paris newspaper offices of 1928-9. Some of the detailing of the houses in the Rue Mallet-Stevens, particularly the sweeping horizontal lines and sweeping curves of the detail at ground level shares visual characteristics with elements of Streamlining in the United States. Mallet-Stevens was a founding member and president of the progressive Union des Artistes Modernes founded in 1929.

French architect. He collaborated with Bourgeois, Chareau, and Jourdain on various projects before setting up his own practice in 1920. He was influenced by Hoffmann and Mackintosh before the 1914–18 war, but the Pavilion of Tourism at the Paris Exposition International des Arts-Décoratifs (1924–5) gained him a position as one of the leading exponents of Art Deco. He is best known for his apartments and other buildings in the Rue Mallet-Stevens, Paris (1926–7), where certain Cubist elements occurred, and later he was a pioneer of International Modernism.

Bibliography

• Kalman (1994)
• Mallet-Stevens (1922, 1929, 1937)
• Pinchon (1990)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

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