Biography

French architect. He had exemplary training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Charles-Auguste Questel and worked in the construction office of the Paris Opéra with Charles Garnier in 1861-66. In 1866 he won the Prix de Rome with a plan for a townhouse. In 1871, after his return from Italy, he was given charge of the reconstruction of the Pavillon de Flore and the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, under the direction of Hector-Martin Lefuel (1810-1880).

In the 1870s, he took part in three major public competitions: for the reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris (1873); for the Sacré-Coeur basilica in Paris (1874); and for the faculty of medicine in Bordeaux (1876). He built the last of these projects between 1880 and 1888, modifying his first plan after a journey abroad during which he studied the layouts of similar buildings. A particular concern was that the façades should harmonize with their 18th-century surroundings, planned by Jacques Gabriel V (1667-1742).

A similar preoccupation with context, as well as a learned eclecticism, is apparent in his enlargement of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, a responsibility he took on at the death of Henri Labrouste in 1875. He chose to restore the existing hôtel particulier, built by Robert de Cotte in the first half of the 18th century, and to reconstruct the interiors to accommodate administrative offices. He continued with the construction of the façades designed by Labrouste and devised a building in the style of Louis XIII to accompany the gallery built by François Mansart.

Pascal designed numerous works in collaboration with other artists, such as the painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau with whom he collaborated on the Chapelle de la Vierge in the cathedral at La Rochelle (1882) and for whom he built a townhouse at 75 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris (1868). With Ernest Coquart (1831-1902) and the sculptor Henri Chapu, he designed the monument to Henri Regnault and the students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts killed in the Franco-Prussian war (1876-77; École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), and on the death of Charles Garnier in 1898 he built a monument to his memory at the Paris Opéra.

The château of Doux at Altillac, Corrèze (c. 1904), was a turning-point in his career. There he laid the foundations of a vernacular style in architecture, using local materials and traditional forms with restrained ornamentation.

He was a popular and influential teacher of architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.