Alfred Agache (1875–1959)
Entry 4
Paris, France
Agache was trained as an architect at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He
also studied at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales, and served as
the head of mission for the Musée Sociale at the 1904 St Louis World’s
Fair. He began a career as a social reformer, using city planning to
achieve that end. He opened his own office in 1910. In 1912 he won a
prize for
his plan for Dunkerque. Later, he won prizes for his extension of Paris
(1920) and City Gardens in Reims (1921). He drew up town plans for a
number of French cities, but his detailed master plan of Rio de Janiero
was his
greatest work.
Agache’s exceptionally attractive but essentially impractical plan
for Canberra divided the city into quarters – for the university,
industry, administration and business. He had less detailed residential
quarters in the outlying sections. Agache was one of the few competitors
to include an airport, in the Business Quarter. The Molonglo river traced
its usual course through a city that his drawings represent as a ‘mini-Paris’.
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