Unknown Paris- Part 8

 
Paris likes to change its mind. Hector Guimard was a highly fashionable Parisian architect when he designed his Art Nouveau métro entrances at the turn of the 20th century. Or was he? Many Parisians thought the designs too morbid and erotic – one highly inventive critic said that the double lamps looked like Fallopian tubes. Another complaint was that the green railings looked like stylized bones. A daily newspaper, Le Figaro, demanded that Paris get rid of "these contorted railings, these hump-backed standard lamps that point out the métro stations like enormous frogs’ eyes". Almost half of Guimard’s 141 station entrances were destroyed or displaced. Fêted as a cultural hero today, during his lifetime Guimard was a victim of Paris’s fickle artistic tastes.