Alexander Vallaury

Alexander Vallaury (1850–1921[1]) was a French-Ottoman architect, who founded architectural education and lectured in the School of Fine Arts in Constantinople (Istanbul), Ottoman Empire.

Décugis House, Beyoğlu

Biography

Vallaury was born in 1850 into a Levantine family in Istanbul. His father, Francesco Vallaury, was a renowned pastry chef, highly respected in court circles. Vallaury's nationality is not definitively known; however, he is assumed to have been of French extraction due to his affinity to French culture.

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, Alexander 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

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 Tommaso 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.[2]

Notable works

See also

References
  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. "Discovering Saint Pierre Han, Part 3". Mavi Boncuk - Cornucopia of Ottomania and Turcomania.
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