French architect Auguste Perret was a pioneering precursor to the Modern Movement. His career is inextricably linked to the constructional technique of reinforced concrete: in works such as his 1903 apartment building in rue Franklin, Paris, concrete -a material that previously had been perceived as common and industrial- was reinvented, handled artistically and given its own idiom. With his projects in France and abroad, Perret caught the attention of a generation searching for a new architecture appropri