Lyon celebrates "its" architect, Tony Garnier, born 150 years ago

Lyon celebrates with pomp the 150 years of Tony Garnier, visionary architect, precursor of modern town planning, to which his hometown owes the Gerland stadium, a hospital, a hall which today bears his name or collective housing.

Conferences, visits, several exhibitions, including one, very rich, at the Municipal Archives of Lyon until March 21 or that of the Fort de Vaise from November 30, are devoted to this architect who helped to modernize Lyon at the beginning of the XNUMXth century.

With the exception of the Town Hall of Boulogne-Billancourt, built in the 30s at the request of the mayor André Morizet, his works will remain in Lyon.

Son of a canut, born on the slopes of the Croix Rousse on August 13, 1869, Tony Garnier is considered to be the first architect to think of the city as a whole. Its main principles, like the idea of garden cities, have influenced contemporary town planning.

"Tony Garnier did not hesitate to upset the city, to make Lyon move. And Edouard Herriot wanted a modern city", noted about his distant predecessor the mayor of Lyon Gérard Collomb during the visit to the exhibition of the Archives, aptly titled "The Mayor and the Architect".

None of Tony Garnier's Lyon works have been classified as Historic Monuments to date, except a part of the Édouard Herriot hospital. And some are worried about the future of this heritage, poorly protected in their eyes.

"We fully agree to include the heritage of Tony Garnier in our reflections. We must keep signs of the past, use them, reuse them, but also that the city evolves," said Mr. Collomb, if proud of the renovation of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu ... which Tony Garnier planned to destroy.

Utopias

After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the architect left for Paris, obtained several awards and attempted the Grand Prix de Rome competition six times, finally obtained at the start of the 1904th century. He stayed four years at the Villa Medici, until XNUMX.

Instead of studying ancient art as it should be, this great admirer of Zola is refining in Rome his project of an Industrial City, a "functionalist" city, based on a zoning system: residential area, administrative area, hospital area , university area ...

This utopia, which will occupy it for years and forge its international reputation, comes to life in the exhibition of the Municipal Archives thanks to rare and remarkable plans, drawings and models.

Well-being of the inhabitants, light, hygiene, integration of nature into the city, leisure and services are at the heart of its City. Le Corbusier approved twenty years later: "Where order reigns, well-being is born".

He was then entrusted with the design of the slaughterhouses and the livestock market in Lyon, inaugurated in 1928 and of which the large hall, named after Tony Garnier, of the Pavilion Hospital of Grange Blanche (Édouard Herriot today), the stadium, remains. Gerland or the City of the United States.

This "hygienist" working city project was proposed in 1919 by the architect. More than 1.600 homes will be built, but after major changes imposed by the town hall ... and the economy. The district was not inaugurated until 1935.

Tony Garnier died on January 19, 1948, without descendants, and with almost no writing on his work.