Sue, (Marie-)Louis
(b Bordeaux, 14 July 1875; d Paris, 7 Aug 1968).

French architect, designer and painter. He trained as an architect at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in the workshop of Victor Laloux. During the period 1903--12 he collaborated with architect and designer Paul Huillard (1875--1966), building country houses, a chateau in Brussels and a series of town houses and blocks of flats for artists in the Montparnasse district, of which the most noteworthy are the three contiguous town houses in the Rue Cassini. They also designed furniture. A meeting with Paul Poiret led to a commission to design the couturier's fashion house and to subsequent commissions from other couturiers, including Mme Paquin and Jean Patou. Following a visit with Poiret to Joseph Hoffmann in Vienna, Sue formed his own design group, the Atelier Francais, in Paris in 1912, modelled on the Wiener Werkstatte, which aimed at the concept of complete design, from the building itself down to the cutlery. This was followed by the Compagnie des Arts Francais (1919--28) formed with the painter Andre Mare (1885--1932; see Art deco). Well-known artists who participated in the group's activities included Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881--1949), Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, Roger de La Fresnaye and Marie Laurencin. A luxuriously engraved publication of their work, Architectures, was prefaced by Paul Valery's philosophical text on the architect's function, 'Eupalinos ou l'architecte', now a basic reference text. Their production included some of the most exquisite homes, shops, liner interiors and hotels of the Art Deco period, exemplified in the two stands presented at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris (1925). Sue also designed social housing, including a garden city in Mericourt, near Lens. During the 1930s Sue continued designing homes for the elite, including a major work, Jean Patou's villa (1932) at Ustarritz in the Basque region. Among other noteworthy works are the block of flats on the Ile St-Louis for Helena Rubinstein, the deluxe cabin on the liner Normandie and a suite of rooms in the stand of the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) in Paris. After spending the years of World War II teaching at the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul, Sue collaborated from 1948 with his nephew, the architect Olivier Sue (b 17 March 1915).

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES
Paris, Inst. Fr. Archit. [archvs]

WRITINGS
with A. Mare: Architectures, preface P. Valery (Paris, 1921)
with L. Vaillat: Le Rythme de l'architecture (Paris, 1923)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Badovici: Interieurs de Sue et Mare (Paris, 1924)
Waldemar-George: Louis Sue (Paris, 1952)
R. Foulk: The Extraordinary Work of Sue et Mare. La Cie des Arts Francais (London, 1979)
S. Day: Louis Sue: Architectures (Paris and Brussels, 1986)
Louis Sue, architecte des annees folles, associe d'Andre Mare (exh. cat. by S. Day, Paris, Inst. Fr. Archit., 1986--7)
F. Camard: Sue et Mare et la Compagnie des arts francais (Paris, 1993)

SUSAN DAY

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