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Lavirotte, Jules (Marie Aimé)
(b Lyon, 25 March 1864; d Paris, March 1924). French architect. He was initially a pupil of Antoine Georges Louvier (1818–92) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, and then of Paul Blondel (1847–97) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He soon showed a taste for profusion of ornament that was widespread in French architecture at that time, for example in the work of Georges Chedanne, Victor Laloux and Edouard Niermans (i). Lavirotte’s first block of flats, built in 1898 at 151, Rue de Grenelle, Paris, is comparatively restrained, with a façade in the Louis XV style facing the street and another façade, in pleasantly coloured enamelled brick, overlooking the courtyard. However with the advent of ceramic exteriors, which were then thought to be required to protect reinforced concrete buildings, he found a suitable medium for exuberant ornamentation. This is the case with his best-known work, the block of flats (1899) at 29, Avenue Rapp, Paris, which was commissioned by the potter Alexandre Bigot (1862–1927). Bigot probably wanted a façade that would give him publicity: the ornamental debauch conceived by Lavirotte proved effective, since Bigot subsequently executed most of his Parisian façades in glazed stoneware. Although the strange forms, with frequent and obvious erotic overtones, and the sometimes violent colours caused those whose conservative taste had been formed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts to find Lavirotte suspect, neither his handling of volume nor his banal arrangement of masses justifies placing him among the masters of Art Nouveau.
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