Paul Nelson

Biography

Studying with the University Princeton (1913-1917), it engages like volunteer in 1917, in the Escadrille Fayette, then the US Air Force.

After the war, it Marie with a Frenchwoman in 1920, and continues its studies with the École of the Art schools of Paris (1920-1927) (in the workshop of Emmanuel Pontremoli then that of Auguste Perret). It is Architecte graduate by the government in 1927.

During the Second world war, he is president of the movement “France for ever”, intended for better making known the French culture with the Americans. He becomes technical adviser with the French Ministry of the rebuilding in 1945, then consulting US Public Health Service and French Ministry of the public health. He also teaches in the most prestigious American universities and is named by André Malraux professor-director of the Franco-American Workshop of Architecture to the 3Ecole Nationale Sup3erieure of the fine arts in 1963. Between 1967 and 1977, it directs to Marseilles also the Free-international Workshop

It is naturalized French in 1973.

It rests in the marine cemetery of Varengeville-On-Sea.

Its works

Paul Nelson was interested in the problems of structuring of space and use of prefabrication (cf its projects of “suspended House” and Palate of discovered), and particularly in the hospital architecture, to which already its subject of diploma related.

In 1932, its project (published by Books of art in 1933) for the new hospital City of Lille is rejected following reactions supporters of corporatism denouncing a direct direct order made with a foreign architect in crisis period. It builds however in 1934 the surgical House of the Hospital of the Company of Suez Canal to Ismaïlia whose innovations were internationally rented: membranes of glass in layers for construction, paving stones of glass for the interior walls, para-solar screens flexible and new concept of ovoid operating rooms.

Its major work remains nevertheless the Hospital memorial France the United States of Saint-Lo, conceived and realized between 1946 and 1956. It also carried out the polyclinic François Ier with the Havre, as well as the hospitals of Dinan (1968) and of Arles (1965-1974).

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