Charles-Louis-Jules LENGYEL (born 1878)

Entrance to a Forest Exhibition [pencil, ink and water color on paper; April 1901]

This design exercise at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris is typical of sketch problems issued throughout the academic year. Often of no more than ten or twelve hours duration, the problem might have been issued at noon and due at midnight of the same day. Even today we call such exercises being “en charrette”, because a cart (a charrette) would pass through the studio at the appointed hour and any project not on the cart after it had passed had failed the exercise.

In 1902 Lengyel was elevated to the atelier (i.e., studio) of Jean-Louis Pascal. A 1905 photograph of Pascal’s students shows both Lengyel and his classmate Paul Cret, who later became chair of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. Lengyel appears to have died in 1906 at the age of twenty-four, before graduating. But what career might he have achieved with a Beaux-Arts credential?

Incidentally, the surname Lengyel is of Hungarian origin.