Ernest Hébrard won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1904 and made his reputation twice over: first with the reconstruction plan for Thessaloniki after the fire of 1917, then, from 1921, as head of the Architecture and Town Planning Service of French Indochina, based in Hanoi. There he laid out the hill station of Da Lat, redrew districts of Hanoi and Phnom Penh, and built a series of government and academic buildings in what he called the style indochinois — reinforced-concrete frames wrapped in deep verandas, louvred screens and multi-tiered tile roofs borrowed from Vietnamese and Khmer models. The style was a colonial instrument as much as an aesthetic one, arguing that French rule could be at home in Asia. He returned to Paris in 1931 and died two years later.
