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Origin and history

The George Eastman Dental Institute was built in the 1930s thanks to a donation from the American industrialist George Eastman, founder of Kodak. Designed by architect Edward Crevel, the building is part of a larger project including the development of Choisy Park. Inaugurated in 1937, it is dedicated to the supervision of dental hygiene of Parisian children. Its red brick facades are decorated with monumental sculptures by Carlo Sarrabezolles, mixing mythological allegories and references to medicine.

During the Second World War, the institute was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht in 1940 to serve as a military hospital (Wehrmacht Zahnklinik Eastmann). At the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, it became a clandestine treatment centre run by FTP resistance fighters, where more than 200 people, often on denunciation, were detained, tortured or executed. Tragic judicial errors were committed, such as the execution of Madeleine Goa, who was innocent, or the prolonged detention of Jean-Pierre Abel, who would later testify in the Cain Age.

After 1945, the institute regained its medical vocation, but its activity declined in the 1980s under pressure from liberal dentists, from 100,000 to 14,000 annually. In 1991, it hosted two municipal laboratories (LHVP and LEPI). Ranked a historic monument in 2019, it is now being redesigned as part of the "Reinvent Paris 2" project.

The building is distinguished by its sober architecture, combining metal frame and red bricks, and its ironwork by Raymond Subes. Sarrabezolles' sculptures, such as the inner medallions representing the child (sleep, play, study) or the external high reliefs (allegories of America offering the institute to France, Hercules terrorizing the hydra of the disease), illustrate its symbolic and pedagogical dimension.

Its dark history during Purification, marked by abuses and judicial errors, inspired works such as the polar I was the collabo Sadorski (2022) by Romain Slocombe or the documentary Rules of Accounts at the Institute (2021). The site remains an architectural and memorial testimony of the contradictions of the twentieth century.

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