The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret

Elizabeth Greenwell Grossman, The Civic Architecture of Paul Crt (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), xxiv + 274 pp., $80.00 (cloth).

Paul Philipe Cret ranked among the most prominent American architects of his generation. Practicing from the first decade of the twentieth century until his death in 1945, he won numerous competitions for major buildings and otherwise secured an array of prestigious commissions. After a distinguished record at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, Cret was given the principal design professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. Over the next three and a half decades he enjoyed national leadership as an architectural educator as well as a practitioner. But like most others of the era, Cret was consigned to the historical wastebin by younger champions of avant-garde modernism who branded all design based on the French academic principles and...