Armand Lemay

Armand Henri Georges Lemay (11 October 1873 – 1963) was a French architect, one of the many prominent designers active in Lille during the era of extensive growth before the First World War. Lemay was born in Lille soon after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the son of a blacksmith, Adolphe François Pierre Lemay. He matriculated to the local Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lille where he studied under Emile Vandenburgh, himself a Lille native, who had studied in the atelier of the great Henri Labrouste in the 1850s at the central Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Lemay launched his career in Lille in 1898, during an era of the city's rapid expansion, along with its neighbors Roubaix and Tourcoing, into one of the great regional centers of industry in modern France. Already interested in collective housing and places of leisure, in 1898 he was commissioned to design the new Union de Lille, also known as the city's Maison du Peuple, which, like its counterparts in the Low Countries and neighboring regions–most famously Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple in Brussels–functioned as a kind of cultural, recreational, and social services center for the city's many industrial workers, which included a grocery store and café. The year it was finished, 1902, Lemay also designed several temporary buildings for the Exposition Internationale de Lille, including the Palace of Liberal Arts, the Illuminated Pavilion and the Machine Hall with most of the industrial exhibits. In 1903, he became the principal architect of the new street called the "rue Beau-Séjour," later the rue Gounod, in Lille's Saint-Maurice Pellevoisin district, where he and other designers erected a now well-known series of single-family regionalist townhouses built of brick, wood, and tile in a characteristically picturesque style. Lemay also built several other grand villas for upper-middle-class clients, particularly along Lille's Grand Boulevard, opened in 1907, a broad, tree-lined avenue with a wide median, which links Lille with both Roubaix and Tourcoing to the north, adjoining the Belgian border.