Eugène Alfred Hénard (; 22 October 1849 – 19 February 1923) was a French architect and a highly influential urban planner. He was a pioneer of roundabouts, which were first introduced in Paris in 1907.
Hénard advocated several major urban projects in Paris, including great radial roads linking the center to a new ring road, and the expansion of the Place de l'Opéra. He was also a strong supporter of increased green space in cities. He proposed an innovative "stepped boulevard" arrangement, where buildings would be set at an angle to the line of the street, thus maximizing light into the apartments. His futuristic visions strongly influenced later architects, notably Le Corbusier.
Life
Early years Eugène Hénard was born in 1849. His father, Antoine-Julien Hénard, was a professor of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, known as the "architect of the 12th" for his work in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Eugène Hénard studied architecture under his father at the École des Beaux-Arts. He proved to be an able student and won several prizes. Eugène Hénard did not win the Grand Prix de Rome, but qualified as an architect in 1880. In 1882 Hénard obtained a position with the Travaux de Paris, the office of public works, remaining with this department for his working life. At first his main responsibility was the design of school buildings.
Engineer and architect
During the planning for the Exposition Universelle (1889) Hénard proposed installing an innovative continuous train system to move visitors around, reducing fatigue and improving flow. The continuous train, or moving sidewalk, would have been powered by electricity. His design had a series of 320 wagons forming a continuous loop with a length of . They would run through the exposition on rails in a trench. Each wagon would be covered with a wooden floor at ground level, and would move relatively slowly. Young and agile passengers could jump on or off at any point. The train would frequently come to a halt for the convenience of women, children and older passengers.
The moving sidewalk project was rejected, but Hénard was assigned as a sub-inspector to help oversee construction of the huge Palais des Machines. He was one of the assistants of Ferdinand Dutert, who designed the building. The largest vaulted building at the time was St Pancras railway station, built in London in 1868, with a span of and height of . The Palais des Machines had a span of and height of . Talking of the structure, Hénard said it successfully combined aesthetic appearance with engineering function. The two goals were complementary. The pavilion was reused for the 1900 exposition, but was dismantled in 1910 despite Hénard plea to preserve it as an architectural monument.
In 1889 Hénard became a member of the prestigious Societé Centrale des Architectes, and was confirmed as sub-inspector of the municipality of Paris. In 1896 Hénard was named assistant director of architectural services to the Exposition Universelle (1900), and in 1897 was detached from his responsibilities to the city. Hénard designed the Palace of Electricity for the exposition, at the end of the Champ de Mars facing the Eiffel Tower. This iron and glass pavilion was the highlight of the Exposition, and also provided power to all the other pavilions. Edmond Paulin created the huge water tower that served as its facade, an extraordinary structure including a huge waterfall and crowned by a statue of the Genius of Electricity over high.
Hénard also designed the Hall of Illusions, a hexagonal structure with a Moorish appearance where the interior walls were covered in mirrors. The giant kaleidoscope created for this hall is now preserved in the Passage Jouffroy. For his work on the 1900 exposition Hénard received a gold medal in architecture and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour.
Urban planner In 1901 Hénard returned to working for the city as an inspector. In 1907 he was appointed architect of the 8th section of the city, comprising the 9th and 17th arrondissements. Between 1901 and 1913 he was responsible for various public works projects in these arrondissements. He directed the commission on Monumental Perspectives from 1910 to 1911, and was made a member of the Council of Civil Buildings.
Hénard also worked with various organizations concerned with health, philanthropy or professional services as an expert on urban planning considerations. In 1908 he headed one of two committees of the Musee Social. His committee was responsible for identifying urban and rural hygiene problems and proposing solutions, while the other committee was to draft legislation and find legal methods for implementing his group's proposals. In November 1911 Henri Prost was assigned to assist him, since he was in poor health. Prost went on to have a distinguished career in urban planning. In 1913 Hénard was one of the founders of the French society of urban architects, which would become the Société française des urbanistes (SFU). Hénard was the first president.
Hénard called for a law that would require urban planning for all cities in France with more than 10,000 people. He became internationally recognized for the series of articles on aspects of urban plans for Paris that he published between 1903 and 1908, including plans to use the former fortifications land for parks and a ring road around Paris, the grande Ceínture. The sixth paper, issued in March 1905, discussed the growth of automobile traffic and the need for radial arteries. The seventh, issued in May 1906, discussed intersections such as roundabouts. Among other innovations he proposed in his Études sur les transformations de Paris were multi-level crossroads, train tracks and metro lines and elevators.
Hénard was preoccupied with finding solutions to the growing traffic problem in Paris, and devoted much of his career to this subject. He prepared many studies and plans for improving the road system in Paris while preserving important buildings and monuments. Hénard wanted to develop better radial thoroughfares, and to take the opportunity presented by demolition of the old city fortifications to build a ring road and new parks and housing. The new housing units would have a staggered arrangement so as to maximize the light received by each apartment and to create more recreational space. He received strong support from organizations such as the Musée Social, and from other urban planners, but was opposed by real estate investors who feared the impact of his planned 75,000 apartment units. After World War I (1914–1918) most of the fortifications area that was to be used for his projects was instead sold in independent parcels to various developers.
Eugène Hénard died in 1923.
Innovations
Statistical study of traffic flow By 1906 there was estimated to be 65,543 vehicles on the streets of Paris. Hénard was a pioneer in traffic studies, breaking down counts of vehicles by type (e.g. household, professional, commercial, etc.) and deriving traffic statistics for each type as the day progressed. Hénard compared Paris to London, Berlin and Moscow, cities that had fewer traffic problems, and concluded that the reason was that the other cities had radial arteries connected to ring roads, which Paris lacked. His diagrams of major cities in Europe where their patterns of radial and ring roads were emphasized were used to support urban plans in the United States, such as those prepared for San Francisco and Chicago by Daniel Burnham.
Improved intersections Hénard proposed various solutions to the problem of efficient traffic flow through road intersections, including a form of cloverleaf interchange. In 1905 Hénard proposed the rule that at busy intersections the vehicles on the right had the right of way. Experiments with this rule were started in 1907, and it was included in the first official traffic regulations published in 1912. The rule stands today. He designed a split-level intersection, in which pedestrians were separated from traffic.
Traffic circles, often with a civic monument in the center, have a long history. Until the growing traffic volume of the twentieth century forced the issue, there was no standard rule for moving round them. In 1897 Holroyd Smith in London proposed a "gyratory" traffic flow, with traffic going round the circle in a defined direction. Hénard proposed the same in Paris in 1903. Hénard called them carrefours à girations. The first test of the concept was with New York's Columbus Circle, completed in 1905. In 1907 the concept was introduced in Paris in the Place de l'Étoile and Place de la Nation. Roundabouts were introduced in Britain and Germany soon after, and became more common in those countries than in France.
Stepped housing
In urban planning, Eugène Hénard was attached to the idea of combining solutions to practical requirements, particularly those arising from the development of motoring, with aesthetic objectives. He said, "It is unfortunate that on the pretext of hygiene and good administration, we forget our past as an artistic people; it is unacceptable that we cannot in our turn create new forms in which, without sacrificing the conditions of scientific progress, the approval of the people and the aspects of beauty also have their share."
In the traditional view of sanitation inherited by Baron Haussmann, it was thought that wide, straight tree-lined boulevards cutting through the city would reduce the danger of epidemics by letting healthy air circulate freely. After the discovery of bacteria, there was no longer seen to be a need for uniform, flat facades along streets to maximize air circulation, although fresh air, sunlight and good sewers were still important. Hénard said that for a public road to provide all the services that heavy traffic is entitled to require, it is necessary that the paved road is properly aligned and that its width is uniform, but this does not imply rigorous alignment of buildings.
Hénard therefore proposed to replace the monotonous lines of house facades and trees parallel to the road with a "stepped boulevard" (boulevard à redans). In one version, the fronts of the buildings would be at angles to the road and to each other, creating triangular spaces in which trees could be planted. In an alternate arrangement, blocks of trees would alternate with apartment blocks along the road, with the apartment blocks connected further back from the road, thus creating a series of square green spaces along the boulevard. The stepped arrangement would provide a greater amount of light and would provide space for small green spaces between the road and the buildings, or for shops and cafes. Hénard considered that the result would give greater freedom to architects. These concepts influenced the pattern of the linear superblocks in Le Corbusier's famous 1922 Ville Contemporaine proposal.
City of the Future
Hénard presented a paper at a conference in 1910 in London on the "City of the Future" that gave a visionary, futurist outline of a high-technology designed city in which the use of private aircraft was widespread. Although they were Utopian at the time, many (but not all) of his suggestions later turned into reality. His streets included conduits for gas, electricity, compressed air, drinking water, pneumatic tubes for letters, telephone lines and so on. There were bathrooms with hot and cold water on every floor. Vacuum powered wall conduits would remove smoky or polluted air from the apartments. Garbage would be thrown down tubes into bins below grade, and service carts would carry it away on rails below the street.
Hénard was the first to propose the concept of an artificial ground level, which influenced later urban architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier.