Garnier, Tony (1869–1948). French architect. Born in Lyons, France, he was City Architect there (1905–19) before setting up his own practice. He designed the huge Abattoirs de la Mouche, Lyons (1909–13), with a gigantic toplit open hall constructed of large steel trusses recalling
Dutert's
Galerie des Machines in Paris (1889). He was also responsible for the stadium (1913–16), the Hôpital Édouard Herriot (1915–20), and the low-cost housing district, États-Unis (1928–35), all in Lyons. He is remembered primarily for his unrealized
Cité Industrielle, a design for a model town of 35,000 people, which he mostly conceived while a student in Rome: it was exhibited in 1904, and published in 1918. While the idea for the
Cité owed something to English ideas (low density, zoning of function, etc.) and the Utopian notions of Fourier and others, the architecture was to be uncompromisingly non-derivative, most of the structure was to be of
reinforced concrete, and the town-planning principles as taught by the École des
Beaux-Arts were jettisoned. The
Cité Industrielle influenced Le
Corbusier and other Modernists. Garnier continued to build monuments, schools, and other buildings until the 1939–45 war, but his chief legacy was in forming C20 ideas about architecture and planning.
Bibliography
T. Garnier (1920, 1932, 1938, 1951);
Guiheux et al. (eds.) (1989);
Hitchcock (1977);
Jullian (1989);
Pawlowski (1967);
Veronesi (1947);
Wiebenson (1970)
