Paul Philippe Cret

Paul Philippe Cret (October 23, 1876 – September 8, 1945) was a French-born Philadelphia architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he taught at a design studio in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Lyon, France, Cret was educated at that city's École des Beaux-Arts, then in Paris, where he studied at the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal.

In 1903, Cret came to the United States to teach at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After having settled in the U.S., Cret was visiting France when World War I broke out. He enlisted and remained in the French Army for the duration of the war, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and made an officer in the Legion of Honor.

Cret's practice in the U.S. began in 1907. His first major commission, designed with Albert Kelsey, was the Pan American Union Building, (the headquarters of what is now the Organization of American States), in Washington D.C., which was built between 1908 and 1910, a breakthrough that led to many war memorials, civic buildings, court houses, and other solid, official structures.

His work through the 1920s was firmly in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but with the radically simplified classical form of the Folger Shakespeare Library, built between 1929 and 1932, he flexibly adopted and applied monumental classical traditions to modernist innovations. Some of Cret's work is remarkably streamlined and forward thinking, and includes collaborations with sculptors such as Alfred Bottiau and Leon Hermant. In the late 1920s, he was brought in as design consultant on Fellheimer and Wagner's, which is the present-day Cincinnati Union Terminal, built between 1929 and 1933 during Art Deco's peak of popularity in architectural style in the U.S. In 1927, Cret became a U.S. citizen. Cret was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1928.

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, which was constructed between 1934 and 1937 and is the university's signature building structure. Cret went on to collaborate on about 20 additional buildings on the University of Texas at Austin campus. In 1935, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member, and became a full academician in 1938.

Cret's contributions to the railroad industry included designing the side fluting on Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr, which debuted in 1934, and the Santa Fe's Super Chief passenger cars, which were completed in 1936.

He was a contributor to Architectural Record, American Architect, and The Craftsman. He wrote the article "Animals in Christian Art" for the Catholic Encyclopedia.