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Umbdenstock, Gustave
(b Colmar, 24 Dec 1866; d Paris, 16 Nov 1940). French architect and teacher. He was a student of Julien Azais Guadet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he won second prize in the Prix de Rome (1896). In partnership with Marcel Auburtin (1872–1926) he designed two buildings (destr.) for the Exposition Universelle, Paris (1900), and then built the French Pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904) in St Louis, MO. He produced many public buildings, including railway stations and churches, and as a member of the Conseil des Bâtiments et Lycées de France he was responsible for such schools as the Lycée Pasteur (1912), Neuilly, and the Lycée Claude-Bernard (1938), Auteuil. He also erected a number of offices and residential buildings, for example for the Banque d’Algérie and for railway and mining companies. Umbdenstock’s architectural styles ranged from 17th-century French classicism to regional and exotic styles; in the 1930s he even made some forays into Modernism. Umbdenstock also taught at the Ecole Polytechnique, where he was a reader from 1901 and Professor of Architecture from 1919 to 1937, and he opened an atelier libre at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1906. A tireless orator, he was convinced that the abandonment of ornament would endanger social harmony. He is best known for his public controversy with Le Corbusier in 1932–5, when he participated in the campaign against the latter mounted by Art National, a revue published by the Association des Architectes Anciens Combattants, of which he was honorary president. Alongside the art historian Louis Hourticq (1875–1944), the art critic Camille Mauclair and the architect René Clozier (1886–1965), he championed the cause of regionalism and traditional building crafts against burgeoning internationalism. Le Corbusier’s Croisade ou le crépuscule des académies (Paris, 1933) was a direct response to the lecture given by Umbdenstock at the Salle Wagram (14 March 1932) in defence of manual building crafts and craftsmen.
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