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Cret, Paul (Philippe)
(b Lyon, 23 Oct 1876; d Philadelphia, PA, 8 Sept 1945). French architect, active in America. He first studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1897–1903), where he was in the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal. After receiving his diploma in 1903 he emigrated to the USA to teach architectural design in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught there until 1937, when he retired due to ill health, and gained a national reputation as a teacher; Louis I. Kahn was his best-known student. A number of influential French critics taught in the USA in the late 19th century and early 20th, but Cret also achieved prominence as a practising architect and received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1938. His designs, even for those competitions that he entered but did not win, such as for the Nebraska State Capitol (1920), Lincoln, NE, the Kansas City Liberty Memorial (1921) and the Smithsonian Gallery of Art (1939), Washington, DC, furthered his distinctive ideas about typology and style. His writings about the Beaux-Arts method of design and about the possibilities of achieving a modern classicism complement and explicate his buildings and teaching.
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