Paul Philippe Cret (October 24 1876, Lyon, France – September 8 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a French-American architect and industrial designer.

Cret was educated at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon then in Paris, and came to the United States in 1903 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Although settled in America, he happened to be in France at the outbreak of World War I and remained in the French army for the duration, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and made an officer in the Legion of Honor.

Cret's practice concentrated mainly on war memorials, civic buildings, and industrial design. In 1931 the regents of The University of Texas at Austin commissioned Cret to design a master-plan for the campus, and build the Beaux-Art Main Building with the university's signature tower. Cret would go on to collaborate on about twenty buildings on the campus.

His work through the 1920s was firmly in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but with the radically simplified classical form of the Folger Shakespeare Library, finished in 1927, he showed himself to be one of those who flexibly adopted and applied monumental classical traditions to modernist innovations. (Bertram Goodhue also falls in that category.) Some of Cret's work is remarkably streamlined and forward-thinking. In the late 1920s the architect was brought in as design consultant on Fellheimer and Wagner's magnificent Cincinnati Union Terminal, the high-water mark of Art Deco style in the United States.

Cret's contributions to the railroad industry also included the design of the side fluting on the Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr and the Santa Fe's Super Chief passenger cars.

He became an American citizen in 1927 and won the AIA Gold Medal in 1938. Ill health forced his resigation from teaching in 1937, and after years of inactivity he died of heart disease.

Major projects:

• the Pan American Union Building (1910, with Albert Kensley)
• the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (opened 1932)
• the Indianapolis Central Public Library (1913-1916, with the firm of Zantzinger, Borie and Medary)
• the Detroit Institute of Art (1921, with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary)
• the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania (1923)
• the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, with Jacques Gréber (1926-1929)
• the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Philadelphia-Camden (opened 1926)
• the Integrity Trust Company, Philadelphia
• Federal Reserve Board Building, now the Eccles Building, Washington D.C. (1937) (his last major work)

References

• First chapter of "The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret"
• examples of Cret's graphic work from University of Pennsylvania archives

1876 births | 1945 deaths | Important people in rail transport | American architects | Paul Cret