Paul Nelson (architect)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Nelson | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 8, 1895 |
| Died | 1979 (aged 83–84) |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Known for | Modern Architecture |
Paul Nelson (8 November 1895 – 1979) was an American-turned-French Modern architect.[1]
Nelson was born in Chicago, Illinois to an American middle-class family of Irish origin. From 1913 to 1917 he studied at Princeton University and in 1917 he enrolled as a volunteer in the LaFayette Escadrille, which was a U.S. unit constituted in 1916 and operated under French command during World War I.
Nelson returned to America after the war to work at a bank and then transitioned to work at his father's interior decoration company. He moved to Paris in 1920 and continued his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the private workshop of Emmanuel Pontremoli and Auguste Perret. He married a French woman, Francine Le Cœur. Francine was the daughter of François Le Cœur, an architect and teacher at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris.
In 1927, Nelson entered the Register of Architects and was certified by the government. He settled in Varengeville-sur-Mer, working in the same workshop used years before by Claude Monet, Jean-Baptiste Corot, and Eugène Isabey. He was friends with figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. He knew many artists such as Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, André Derain, Fernand Léger, and Alberto Giacometti.
During the Second World War, Nelson returned to the United States and acted as chairman of the “France for ever” movement, which aimed to spread French culture to Americans. In 1944, he was appointed as head of the Construction and Urban Planning division at the French Supply mission in Washington. In 1945, he became the Technical Advisor to the French Ministry of Reconstruction. He later took the role as adviser to the US National Health Service for the French Ministry of Public Health. He organized an exhibition at Grand Palais regarding American architectural and construction techniques. His wife died in 1951, and a year later he married the painter Madd Giannattasio, daughter of Ugo Giannattasio, futurist painter and writer. The couple had two sons, Ugo and Rory, an architect and a musician respectively.
Nelson taught in the most prestigious American universities. In 1963, André Malraux appointed him as Director of Atelier Franco-Américain d’Architecture at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Between 1967 and 1977, he also headed the Atelier Franco-International in Marseille.
In 1973, Nelson obtained French citizenship.
Nelson died in 1979. He was buried in the Varengeville-sur-Mer cemetery, near his wife Madd Giannattasio and the painter Georges Braque, his great friend who had joined him in Normandy in 1929 and for whom he had designed the atelier.
