When Hector Guimard was commissioned to design these famous subway station gates, Paris was only the second city in the world (after London) to have constructed an underground railway. Guimard's design answered the desire to celebrate and promote this new infrastructure with a bold structure that would be clearly visible on the Paris streetscape. The gate utilizes the sinuous, organic forms that are so typical of the Art Nouveau style, yet while it appears at first to be a single component, it is in fact made up of several parts that could be easily mass produced in Paris. In effect, Guimard had concealed an aspect of the object's modernity beneath its soft forms, a strategy that is symptomatic of Art Nouveau's ambivalent attitude to the modern age. Ironically, perhaps, Guimard's design was instrumental in popularizing Art Nouveau, and making the style an important early stage in the evolution of modernist design.