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Alexandre Vallaury

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Décugis House, Beyoğlu

Alexandre Vallaury (1850–1921[1]) was a French-Ottoman architect who established architectural education in the Ottoman Empire at the School of Fine Arts in Constantinople. Nicknamed "architect of the city" (Ottoman Turkish: Mimar-ı Şehir) by Osman Hamdi Bey, Vallaury, alongside his collaborator and palace architect Raimondo D'Aronco, was a leading practitioner of Orientalist eclecticism.[2]

Biography

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Vallaury (also spelled Vallauri) was born in 1850 into a Levantine family in Istanbul. His father, Francesco Vallauri, was a renowned pastry chef from Nice, highly respected in court circles. Vallaury's nationality is not definitively known; he was born in modern day Istanbul and, as his family emigrated from Nice at a time when the city was still under italian rule, he is assumed to have been of both Franco-Levantine or Italian-Levantine extraction due to his affinity to both cultures.

Between 1869 and 1878, Vallaury lived in Paris, France, where he studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Returning to Istanbul in 1880, he met Osman Hamdi Bey, who was at that time curator of the newly established Imperial Museum (Turkish: Müze-i Humayun - now the Istanbul Archaeology Museum), during an exhibition of his relief drawings of various architectural monuments. The two artists worked closely together in the fields of archaeology, museum work and education in fine arts.

Following the foundation of the first School of Fine Arts (Turkish: Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi, now the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) in Turkey on January 1, 1882, Alexandre Vallaury started working in the architecture department. He lectured at the school for 25 years until his retirement in 1908.

Postcard of the Public Debt Administration building
Ottoman Bank Headquarters
Pera Palace Hotel

Following the 1894 Istanbul earthquake, he was appointed to work on various commissions for city planning. Remembered by Osman Bey as the "City Architect" (Mimar-ı Şehir), Vallaury was almost invariably the architect chosen by the upper echelons of Ottoman high officials and French business circles while he worked at the School of Fine Arts. On some of these projects, he worked with the Italian architect Raimondo D'Aronco, the chief architect at the sultan's palace.

In 1896, he was awarded France's Legion of Honour to go with many other medals and awards from the French and Ottoman governments.

Vallaury combined traditional Ottoman architecture with elements of Beaux-Arts architecture in the buildings he designed for members of the palace and for high officials in Istanbul. His architecture showed great variety, drawing on a broad spectrum of styles from Islamic-Ottoman synthesis to Neoclassical architecture. He used motifs from international Orientalism for some Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Ottoman structures which often incorporated Neo-Baroque and Art Nouveau details. His workshop was located at Saint Pierre Han in Galata.[3]

Notable works

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Cercle de l'Orient building, Istanbul, now Grand Pera complex

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Laegreid, Sissel; Skorgen, Torgeir; Holm, Helge Vidar (2012-10-31). The Borders of Europe: Hegemony, Aesthetics and Border Poetics. Aarhus Universitetsforlag. ISBN 978-87-7124-734-3.
  2. ^ Kula Say, Seda. "Alexander Vallaury's Architecture: an Overview". Levantine Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
  3. ^ "Discovering Saint Pierre Han, Part 3". Mavi Boncuk - Cornucopia of Ottomania and Turcomania.
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