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Laprade, Albert
(b Buzançais, Indre, 29 Nov 1883; d Paris, 9 May 1978). French architect, urban planner, draughtsman and writer. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1903–10), where he was a pupil of Gaston Redon. In 1915, after being wounded in World War I, he went to Morocco where he worked with Henri Prost on the design of towns under the authority of General Lyautey, including a plan for Casablanca; he also built the Résidence Générale in Rabat. In 1920 he returned to France and went into private practice. Notable examples of his early work, which combined modern structure with a simplified classicist form, include the Citroën showroom (1928), Rue Marbeuf, Paris, with an elegant metal frame and huge window, and the EDF building (1928) at 76 Rue de Rennes, Paris; the Musée des Arts Africains (with Léon Janssely) at the Exposition Coloniale of 1931, Paris; and a building (1934) in Lille for the newspaper Les Echos du Nord. His uncle Réne Sergent served in the practice during the 1920s. From 1939 to 1949 he built the EDF hydro-electric dam, one of the largest in Europe, at Génissiat on the Rhône, and in 1943 he prepared plans for the reconstruction of Valenciennes and Lille. The high quality of his earlier work was less evident in buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s such as the administrative centre (1954), Lille; the Renault offices (1961–2; with Claude Barré), Paris; the Hilton Hotel (1961–2; with Claude Barré), Orly; and the Cité Administrative (1965), Paris. Laprade was an important writer; he produced several books on architectural history and his articles in journals such as L’Architecture and La Construction moderne provided a chronicle of contemporary architecture from the 1920s until his death.
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