Emile Jacques Gilbert

Biography

Admitted in 1813 with the imperial School of the fine arts, it there studies the Architecture (workshop of Barthelemy Vignon) and obtains the First Grand Prix of Rome in 1822. It is remarkable that he was the first boarder of the Villa Médicis with Rome to have included a Greek monument (located in Sicily) in one of his “sendings”.

Of return to Paris in 1828, he becomes factory inspector of the Triumphal arch of Star before obtaining, in 1833, the ordering of the Asile of Charenton which will full-time occupy it until in 1842 approximately, then sporadically until its death. Starting from 1847, it is assisted there of his/her son-in-law Arthur Stanislas Diet (1827 - 1891).

In 1836, it is seen entrusting the load, with Jean François Joseph Lecointe, of the construction of the prison of the New Force (known as “Mazas prison”), built between 1842 and 1850 and destroyed today. In 1853, Henri Davenne, very new director of the Public assistance created in 1849, Gilbert load to make first studies “for the construction of a new hospital of 800 beds intended to replace the current Hospital”, but, taking into account the delays due to the multiple oppositions to the project, it is Diet which carries out the execution of it.

It receives thereafter the ordering of the new Mortuary, on a ground located at the bedside of Notre-Dame and the point of the island of the City, which it carries out between 1861 and 1863.
In 1855, it conceives the project of the old police headquarter, built between 1863 and 1868. This building of the quay of the Goldsmiths, contiguous into the Law courts, is integrated there in 1875 - 1880, when the prefecture settles near the Parvis of Notre-Dame.

Gilbert, appointed Architect of the Town of Paris, then Architect as a chief of the first division of the labor of the Prefecture of the Seine, becomes member of the council of the professors and the jury of architecture of the School of the fine arts as of 1845. In 1853, it is named Secretary-archivist of the establishment and elected official, the same year, with the Académie of the fine arts. He is also founding member of the central Société of the architects, whom he chairs of 1854 1864. Promoted Officer of the Legion of honor in 1860 and named member of the Council and General inspector of the civil buildings in 1863, Emile Jacques Gilbert dies out in Paris on October 31st 1874.

Its work

Emile Jacques Gilbert is considered, at the beginning of his career, like an architect of great talent: the new district of the men of the old people's home of Charenton (1833-1846) and the prison Mazas (1842-1850) immediately and are unanimously greeted like major architectural works.

Some are ironical about the fact that the work of Gilbert is made up only of buildings with rather sinister connotation: an old people's home of lunatics, a prison, a police headquarter, a hospital, a mortuary and a deposit of begging! It does not seem that there is deliberate choice of the architect, nor a will “to dedicate its career to marginalized and suffering humanity”. At the XIXe century, the public order seldom relates on a particular building but rather to the management of the whole of the buildings depending on an institution; it is thus as Architecte of the Town of Paris or a divisional Architect of the Seine that Gilbert composes the essence of his career.

One made of Gilbert, perhaps a little quickly, the founder of the “rationalist school” Néoclassique. What one can, in any case, to retain of the large features of its personality, it is, on the one hand, its major interest for the art of the Antiquité, in particular for the Greek Art, and, on the other hand, its great capacity to include/understand what was wished of the silent partner, and even to improve its program. In a step which one can indeed describe as “rationalist”, it had the gift to narrowly adapt its architectural project to the required objectives. This step was, moreover, all the more easy for him as it was able to interpret styles of a very great diversity.

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