Original Paris Métro Entrance by Hector Guimard

"Constructed like the Crystal Palace out of interchangeable, prefabricated cast iron and glass parts, Guimard created his métro system in opposition to the ruling taste of French classical culture...Guimard's system flourished, emerging overnight like the manifestation of some organic force, its sinuous green cast-iron tentacles erupting from the subterranean labyrinth to support a variety of barriers, pergolas, maps, hooded light fittings and glazed canopies. These surrealistic 'dragonfly's wings'—to quote a contemporary critic—received a mixed, not to say chauvinistic, press, the verdigris colour of their iron supports being regarded as German rather than French. This imaginative attempt to render the Orphic myth in modern terms was to be complemented later by the astringent technical forms of the elevated section of the métro, built to the designs of the architect Jean Camille-Formigé and the engineer Louis Biette."

— Kenneth Frampton and Yukio Futagawa. Modern Architecture 1851-1945. p106.