Gabriel Guevrekian
Gabriel Guevrekian (* 1892 or 1900 in Constantinople Opel, † October 29, 1970 in Antibes ) was an Armenian- American architect, landscape architect, designer and university lecturer.
Life
Guevrekian was probably born in 1892 ( according to a source also 1900) in Constantinople Opel, moved with his Armenian family but soon after Tehran. 1910 emigrated Guevrekian to Vienna, where he lived with an uncle. From 1915 to 1919 he studied at the School of Applied Arts Vienna, Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank. Until 1922 or 1923, he worked in the studio of Josef Hoffmann and Strnad. In 1920 Guevrekian was also more common in Paris, where he worked with Robert Mallet- Stevens. It produced designs for gardens and villas in Paris and on the Côte d' Azur. From 1922 to 1926, he was then a partner of Mallet -Stevens and lived in the French capital.
1926 Guevrekian started his own business as an architect, designer and landscape architect. In 1928 he became the General Secretary of the CIAM. So he learned Henri Sauvage, Le Corbusier, André Lurçat and Sigfried Giedion know. In 1930 he was a founding member of the professional journal " L'architecture d' aujourd'hui ". In 1932, he plans a draft of a double dwelling house for the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in Vienna, in the following year created a design for the Villa Kosrovani in Tehran. There he lived until 1937 and was then by the Shah to the city architect and planner of Tehran. His tenure covered major new buildings for homes, residences and several government buildings.
1937 to 1940 the architect lived in London and Paris, from 1940 he was again settled in Paris. From 1946, he was then head of architecture class at the National School of Arts and Crafts Saarbrücken and worked closely with Georges- Henri Pingusson together. In 1948 he was appointed professor at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn (USA ) was appointed, only a year later he moved to the teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign, where he taught until 1969 architecture.
In 1955 he became an American citizen.
Work
During his years in Vienna, Gabriel Guevrekian moved mainly in the Viennese school environment to Strnad, Frank and Hoffmann. Influential was the collaboration with Mallet -Stevens for him. He got more important ideas from 1922 in Paris, where he found through his work at the CIEM connection to the circle of functionalists to Le Corbusier, Giedion and Lurçat.
Guevrekian preferably worked with concrete and minimalist, geometric shapes. Larger fame he achieved with the designs for Sonja Delaunay Boutique simultanée and the cubist garden at the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes" in Paris in 1925, the breakthrough came with a three-storey villa for the fashion designer Jacques Heim in Neuilly. 1930-1932 is Guevrekian involved with the semi-detached houses Woinovichgasse 10-12 in the project of the Vienna Werkbund housing estate, which was looking for new alternatives in the field of social housing. 1933 Guevrekian was appointed by the Shah of Iran to Tehran and held the office of city architect and town planner of Tehran. Guevrekian influenced the city in the following years with modern buildings of European style.