Architecture by André Pavlovsky: The Basque Coast of the 1930s

André Pavlovsky (1891-1961) was one of the most inventive architects of the Basque Coast. Born to Russian emigrant parents and trained at the Paris School of Fine Arts, he began his career in the North, associated with Louis Quételart's reconstruction of Méteren and Vieille-Chapelle which were destroyed by the war. He established a personal architectural style, in which we perceive the theoretical and ethical influence of the monk-architect Dom Bellot. In 1924, attracted by the region's tourist boom, he opened an agency in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. A cosmopolitan spirit determined not to let himself be contaminated by neoregionalism, with the Labourd farm as an obligatory reference, Pavlovsky strove to define a modern Basque style. Using new materials, playing on the relationship of light and shadow and on their place in the landscape, he built the villas of major industrialists and financiers, particularly around the Chantaco golf course. And most famously, in 1936, he created the lights of the port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, marked with vertical green and red bands, which became the emblems of the Luzian city.

• 23 x 28.5 cm
• 208 pages
• 250 black and white and color illustrations
• ISBN: 978-2-9092-8300-5
• With the IFA
• Text in French only