Roger-Henri Expert

(b Arcachon, 18 April 1882; d Ch?teau de Calvimont, commune of C?rons, 13 April 1955). French architect, urban planner and teacher. In 1906 he entered the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, initially under Gustave Umbdenstock and from 1909 with Odilon Redon. On leaving the school in 1912 he worked for Andr? Granet, a fellow student and the nephew of Gustave Eiffel. He participated from 1912 to 1914 in drawing up the Cit? Mondiale design, financed by the sculptor Hendrick Christian Andersen (b 1872), as part of a team directed by the architect Ernest H?brard. He also submitted a plan (1919), with L?on Jaussely and Louis Soller, for the expansion of Paris, which won first prize. Expert's mature work was a distillation of disparate strands in French art between the wars, when he became regarded as an ambassador of French taste. Most importantly, he blended the logical and scientific undercurrent of the architecture of the period with a retrospective affinity for Hellenism. His use of tall, slender Doric columns, with neither base nor capital, in the Villa Tethys (1924), and Villa Kypris (1926), both at Arcachon, and the French Legation (1928-33) in Belgrade illustrate his particularly 20th-century neo-classicism.

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