Rene Binet was a French painter and architect of the Art Nouveau. He was a student of Victor Laloux from 1886 on the Ecole des beaux-arts in Paris.

Rene Binet realized the Monumental Gate, Place de la Concorde for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. It was commissioned to him in December 1896 and built between March 1899 and mid-April 1900, had several sources at the forefront of his conception: from childhood memories to the polychrome architecture of Venice, from the Treatise on colors by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 -1832) to the work of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), of whom Binet liked to immerse himself in the fifty volumes preserved in the library of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Binet wanted to realize something "that has never been done in architecture, an architecture of color and light" . Thus this door was noticed, not by polychrome in itself, but as the first attempt at the domestication of electricity at the service of color and architecture.

In August 1900, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor