Architecture

The round numbers of chronology have no necessary significance historically. Centuries as cultural entities often begin and end decades before or after the hundred-year mark. The years around 1800, however, do provide a significant break in the history of architecture, not so much because of any major shift in style at that precise point as because the Napoleonic Wars caused a general hiatus in building production. The last major European style, the Baroque, had been all but dissolved away in most of Europe. The beginnings of several differing kinds of reaction against it—Academic in Italy, Rococo in France, Palladian in England—go back as far as the first quarter of the century; shortly after the mid century there came a more concerted stylistic revolution.

1750 and 1790 the new style that is called ‘Romantic Classicism’^[1] took form, producing by the eighties its most remarkable projects, and even before that some executed work of consequence in France and in England. Thus the nineteenth century could inherit the tradition of a completed architectural revolution, and at its very outset was in possession of a style that had been fully mature for more than a decade. The most effective reaction against the Baroque in the second, and even to some extent the third, quarter of the eighteenth century had taken place in England; the later architectural revolution that actually initiated Romantic Classicism centred in France.

Yet Paris was not the original locus of the new style’s gestation but rather Rome.^[2] From the early sixteenth century Rome had provided the international headquarters from which new ideas in the arts, by no means necessarily originated there, were distributed to the Western world. To Rome came generation after generation of young artists, connoisseurs, and collectors to form their taste and to formulate their aesthetic ideals. Some even settled there for life. From the time of Colbert the French State maintained an academic establishment in Rome for the post-graduate training of artists. Thus French hegemony in the arts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was based on a tradition maintained and renewed at Rome. The nationals of other countries came to Rome more informally, and were for the most part supported by their own funds or by private patrons; only in the seventies were young English architects of promise first awarded travelling studentships by George III. In the fifties the number of northern architects studying in Rome notably increased; some of them, beginning with the Scot Robert Mylne (1734-1811) in 1758, won prizes in the competitions held by the Roman Academy of St Luke.^[3]

The initiation of Romantic Classicism was by no means solely in the hands of architects. In the mid-century period of Roman gestation, Winckelmann, Gavin Hamilton, and Piranesi—a German archaeologist, a Scottish painter, and a Venetian etcher—played significant roles, as well as various architects, some pensionnaires of the French Academy, others Britons studying on their own. Certain aspects of Romantic Classicism (1720-78), not the projects in his Prima parte di architettura of 1743 or the plates of ruins in his Antichità romane of 1748 but his fanciful Carceri dating from the mid 1740s. On the theoretical side the Essai sur l’architecture of M.-A. Laugier (1713-70), which first appeared anonymously in 1751 with further editions in 1752, 1753, and 1755, had something of real consequence to contribute as a basic critique of the dying Baroque style. In simple terms Laugier may be called both a Neo-Classicist and a Functionalist. The bolder functionalist ideas of an Italian Franciscan Carlo Lodoli (1690-1761) as presented by Francesco Algarotti in his Lettere sopra l’architettura, beginning in 1742, and in his Saggio sopra l’architettura of 1756 were also influential. However, despite all the new archaeological treatises inspired by the Roman milieu, of which the first was the Ruins of Palmyra published in 1753 by Robert Wood (1717-71), and all the excavations undertaken at Herculaneum over the years 1738-65 and those at Pompeii beginning a decade later, the first architectural manifestations of Romantic Classicism did not occur on Italian soil.

Two buildings begun in the late 1750s, one a very large church in France completed only in 1790, the other a mere garden pavilion in England, may be considered to announce the architectural revolution: Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, desecrated and made a secular Panthéon in 1791 immediately after its completion, was designed by J.-G. Soufflot (1713-80);^[4] the Doric Temple at Hagley Park in Worcestershire is by his exact contemporary James Stuart (1713-88). The Panthéon remains one of the most conspicuous eighteenth-century monuments of Paris; the Hagley temple is familiar today only to specialists. Yet, historically, Stuart’s importance is rather greater than Soufflot’s, even though his production was almost negligible in quantity. Born and partly trained in Lyons, Soufflot studied early in Rome and returned to Italy again in the middle of the century. Like several of the French theorists of the day, he had had a lively interest in Gothic construction from his Lyons days. He owed his selection to design Sainte-Geneviève in 1755 to his friendship with Louis XV’s Directeur Général des Bâtiments, the Marquis de Marigny, brother of Mme de Pompadour, whom he had accompanied to Italy in 1749 along with the influential critics C.-N. Cochin and the Abbé Leblanc.

The Scottish architect James Stuart had also gone to Rome, and formed there as early as 1748 the project of visiting Athens; by 1751 he was on his way, accompanied by Nicholas Revett (c. 1721-1804), with whom he proposed to produce an archaeological work on the Antiquities of Athens. The publication of the first volume of this epoch-making book was delayed until 1762. In the meantime, in 1758, the year Stuart designed his Hagley temple, J.-D. Leroy (1724-1803) got ahead of him by publishing Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce; but the very pictorial and inaccurate plates in this had little practical effect on architecture.

The significance of Stuart’s temple may be readily guessed; small though it is, this fabrick was the first example of the re-use of the Greek Doric order^[5]—so barbarous, or at least so primitive, in appearance to mid-eighteenth-century eyes—and the first edifice to attempt an archaeological reconstruction of a Greek temple. By the fifties many architects and critics were ready to accept the primacy of Greek over Roman art, if not little or no knowledge of Greek architecture several French writers before Laugier had praised it. J. J. Winckelmann also recommended Greek rather than Roman models in his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke (Dresden, 1755) published just before he settled in Rome.^[6]

Out of Italian chauvinism Piranesi attacked the theory of Grecian primacy in the arts; yet before his death he had prepared an impressive and influential set of etchings of the Greek temples at Paestum which his son Francesco published. In 1760, moreover, Piranesi decorated the Caffè Inglese in Rome in an Egyptian mode. Eventually Greek precedent in detail all but superseded Roman for over a generation; yet a real Greek Revival, at best but one aspect of Romantic Classicism, did not mature until after 1800. There was never a widespread Egyptian Revival,^[7] but Egyptian inspiration did play a real part in crystallizing the formal ideals of Romantic Classicism; it also provided certain characteristic architectural forms, such as the pyramid and the obelisk, and occasional decorative details.

Soufflot’s vast cruciform Panthéon provides no such simple paradigm as Stuart’s temple. No longer really Baroque, it is by no means thoroughly Romantic Classical. Like most of the work of the leading British architect of Soufflot’s generation, Robert Adam (1728-92),^[8] the Panthéon must rather be considered stylistically transitional. For example, the purity of the temple portico at the front, in any case Roman not Grecian, is diminished by the breaks at its corners. The tall, hemispherical dome^[9] over the crossing is even less antique in character, owing its form to Wren’s St Paul’s rather than to the Roman Pantheon, which was the favourite domical model for later Romantic Classicists. In the interior, up to the entablatures, the columniation is Classical enough and the structure entirely trabeated^[10]—at least in appearance (Plate 1). Above, the domes in the four arms are perhaps Roman, but hardly the pendentives that carry them; these are, of course, a Byzantine structural device revived in the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi. Over the aisles the cutting away of the masonry and the general statical approach, while not producing anything that looks very Gothic, illustrate the results of Soufflot’s long-pursued study of Gothic vaulting. Many aspects of nineteenth-century architectural development were thus presaged by Soufflot here, as will become very evident later (see Chapters 1-3, 6, and 7).^[11]

The Panthéon was finally finished in the decade after Soufflot’s death by his own pupil Maximilien Brébion (1716-c. 1792), J.-B. Rondelet (1743-1829), a pupil of J.-F. Blondel, and Soufflot’s nephew (François, ?-c. 1802). Well before that, a whole generation of French architects had developed a mode, similar to Adam’s in England, which is usually called, despite its initiation long before Louis XV’s death in 1774, the style Louis XVI. Whether or not this mode in its inception owed much to English inspiration is still controversial. In any case it was widely influential outside France from the seventies to the nineties, and in those decades both French-born and French-trained designers were in great demand all over Europe, except in England; and even in England French craftsmen were employed. With that completely eighteenth-century phase of architectural history this book cannot deal, even though most of the architects who after 1800 had first made their reputation under Louis XVI, or even earlier under Louis XV. The style Louis XVI and the English ‘Adam Style’ were over, except in remote provinces and colonial dependencies, by 1800.

In various executed works of the decades preceding the French Revolution it is possible to trace the gradual emergence of mature Romantic Classicism in France, as also to some extent in the executed buildings and, above all, the projects of the younger George Dance (1741-1825)^[12] in England. But it is in the extraordinary designs, dating from the eighties, by two French architects a good deal younger than Soufflot that the new ideals were most boldly and completely visualized. In the last twenty-five years these two men, L.-E. Boullée (1728-99) and C.-N. Ledoux (1736-1806), have increasingly been recognized as the first great masters of Romantic Classical design if not, in the fullest sense, the first great Romantic Classical architects. Boullée built little and few of his projects and none of the manuscript of his book on architecture, both now preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, were published—or at least not until modern times.^[13] Yet they must have been well known to his many pupils—including J.-N.-L. Durand, who was the author of the most influential architectural treatise of the Empire period, and doubtless to others as well (see Chapters 2 and 3).

Ledoux was from the first a very successful architect, working with assurance and considerable versatility in the style Louis XVI from the late sixties, particularly for Mme du Barry. He became an academician and architecte du roi in 1773 and spent the next few years at Cassel in Germany. His major executed works are in France, however, and belong to the late seventies and eighties. These are the Besançon Theatre of 1775-84, the buildings of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans near there of 1775-9—he had been made inspecteur of the establishment in 1771—and the barrières or toll-houses of Paris, which were built in 1784-9 just before the Revolution. In this later work most of the major qualities of his personal style, qualities carried to much greater extremes in his projects, are readily recognizable; his earlier work was of rather transitional character and not at all unlike what many other French architects of his generation were producing.

The massive cube of the exterior of Ledoux’s Besançon Theatre, against which an unpedimented Ionic portico is set, can already be found, however, at his Château de Benouville begun in 1768; the later edifice is nevertheless much more rigidly cubical and much plainer in the treatment of the rare openings. In the interior Ledoux substituted for a Baroque horseshoe with tiers of boxes a hemicycle^[14] with rising banks of seats and a continuous Greek Doric colonnade around the rear fronting the gallery. The extant constructions at Arc-et-Senans are less geometrical; instead of Greek orders there is much rustication and also various Piranesian touches of visual drama. It was this commission which set Ledoux to designing his ‘Ville Idéale de Chaux’; that was his greatest achievement, even though it never came even to partial execution, nor could perhaps have been expected to do so, so cosmic was the basic concept.

The barrières varied very widely in character; some were very Classical, others in a modest Italianate vernacular; some were rather Piranesian in their bold rustication, the Besançon Theatre. The most significant, however, were notable for the crisp and rigid geometry of their flat-surfaced masses. The extant Barrière de St Martin in the Place de Stalingrad in the La Villette district of Paris consists of a tall cylinder rising out of a very low, square block; this is intersected by a cruciform element projecting as three pedimented porticoes beyond the edges of the square (Plate 2A). Although the range of Ledoux’s restricted detail here is not very great, it is varied to the point of inconsistency all the same. The rather heavy piers of the porticoes are square, with capitals simplified from the Grecian Doric; yet around the cylinder extends an open arcade of Italian character carried on delicate coupled columns.

Had Ledoux’s ideas been known only from his executed work, he would probably not have been especially influential; certainly he would not have attained with posterity the very high reputation that is his today. Inactive at building after the Revolution—he was even imprisoned for a while in the nineties—he concentrated on the publication of his designs both executed and projected. His book L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation appeared in 1804, and a second edition was published by Daniel Ramée (1806-87) in 1846-7. This book has a long and fascinating text which is sociological as much as it is architectural; but it is in its plates, both of executed work and projects, that Ledoux’s originality can best be appreciated. By no means all of his ideas, known before the Revolution to his pupils and undoubtedly to many others as well, passed into the general repertory of Romantic Classicism; some of the most extreme are hardly buildable. The ‘House for Rural Guards’ is a free-standing sphere, a form that he utilized as space rather than mass in the interior of a project for a Columbarium. For the ‘Coopery’, the coopers’ products dictated the target-like shape (Plate 2B). The ‘House for the Directors of the Loue River’ is also a cylinder set horizontally, but a much more massive one, through which the whole flood of the river was to pour to the thorough discomfort, one would imagine, of the inhabitants. Even where the forms are more conventional, as in the project for the church of his ‘Ville Idéale’ of Chaux—a purified version of Soufflot’s Panthéon: cruciform, temple-porticoed, and with a Roman saucer dome—or for the bank there—a peristylar rectangle with high, plain attic, flanked at the corners by detached cubic lodges—the clarity and originality of his formal thinking is very evident, and was apparently influential well before his book actually appeared in 1804. Masses are of simple geometrical shapes, discrete and boldly juxtaposed; walls are flat and as little broken as possible, the few necessary openings mere rectangular holes. Minor features are repeated without variation of rhythm in regular reiterative patterns; the top surfaces of the masses, whether flat, sloping, or rounded, are considered as bounding planes, not modelled plastically in the Baroque way.^[15]

Much of this is common to the projects of Boullée, more widely known than Ledoux’s in the eighties because of his many pupils. The simple geometrical forms, the plain surfaces, the reiterative handling of minor features, all are even more conspicuous in his designs and generally presented at a scale so grand as to approach megalomania (Plate 2C). Boullée could be, and often was, more conventionally the Classical Revivalist than Ledoux; he was also perhaps somewhat less bold in using such shapes as the sphere cube and the pyramid. His inspiration was on occasion medieval (of a very special South European ‘Castellated’ order), and he thereby laid the foundations for that more widely eclectic use of the forms of the past which makes the Romantic Classical a syncretic style, not a mere revival of Roman or Greek architecture. Various projects of the eighties by younger men, such as Bernard Poyet (1742-1824) and L.-J. Desprez (1743-1804), of whom we will hear again later, were of very similar character.

Both Boullée and Ledoux, but particularly Ledoux, were interested in symbolism. In that sense their architecture was not essentially abstract, despite the extreme geometrical simplicity of their forms, but in their own term parlante or expressive and meaningful. So special and personal is most of their symbolism, however, that even when quite obvious, as with the ‘Coopery’, it was hardly viable for other architects. When Ledoux gave to his Oikema or ‘House of Sexual Education’ an actual plan of phallic outline (which would be wholly unnoticeable except from the air) he epitomized the hermetic quality of much of his architectural speech. It is understandable that, of the many who accepted his architectural syntax, very few really attempted to speak his language. Such symbolism belonged on the whole to an early stage of Romantic Classicism; after 1800 architectural speech was generally of a much less recondite order. Yet to each of the different vocabularies employed by Romantic Classicists—Grecian, Egyptian, Italian, Castellated, etc.—some sort of special meaning was commonly attached. Thus a restricted and codified eclecticism provided, as it were, the equivalent of a system of musical keys that could be chosen according to a conventional code when designing different types of buildings.

One cannot properly say that international Romantic Classicism derives to any major degree from Ledoux and Boullée; one can only say that their projects of the eighties epitomized most dramatically the final ending of the Baroque and the crystallization of the style that succeeded it. Many French architects of the generation of Poyet and Desprez, however, such as J.-J. Ramée, Pompon, A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer, L.-P. Baltard, Belanger, Grandjean de Montigny, Damesme, and Durand (to mention only those whose names will recur later) came close to rivalling even the grandest visions of Ledoux and Boullée in projects prepared in the nineties.^[16] After such exalted work on paper, the buildings actually executed by this generation of Romantic Classicists often seem rather tame. So also were the glorious social schemes of the political revolutionaries much diluted by the functioning governments of Consulate and Empire before and after 1800.

Only in England did the decades preceding the French Revolution produce any development in architecture at all comparable in significance to what was taking place then in France. But there also it is the projects rather than the executed work of Dance—of which very little remains except his early London church of All Hallows, London Wall, of 1765-7—that modern investigators have come to realize led most definitely away from the transitional ‘Adam Style’ towards Romantic Classicism. His Piranesian Newgate Prison, begun in 1769, was demolished in 1902. By 1790, both in France and in England, the new ideas had taken firm root, however, and other countries were not slow to accept the mature style once it had been fully adumbrated.

The fact that the nineteenth century began with much of Europe under the hegemony of a French Empire does not quite justify calling the particular phase of Romantic Classicism with which the nineteenth century opens Empire, although this is frequently done in most European countries. Yet the prestige of Napoleon’s rule, and indeed its actual extent, ensured around 1800 the continuance of that French leadership in architecture which had started a century earlier under Louis XIV. Beyond the boundaries of Napoleon’s realm and the lands of his nominees and his allies, moreover, French émigrés carried the new architectural ideas of the last years of the monarchy—for many of them were revolutionaries in the arts, although like Ledoux politically unacceptable to the leaders of the Revolution in France. Even in the homeland of Napoleon’s principal opponents, the English, the prestige of French taste, high in the eighties, hardly declined with the Napoleonic wars. The mature Romantic Classicism of England in the last decade of the old century and the first of the new is certainly full of French ideas, even though it is not always clear exactly how they were transmitted across the Channel in war-time.

If Romantic Classicism, the nearly universal style with which nineteenth-century architecture began, was predominantly French in origin and in its continuing ideals and standards, the same decades that saw it reach maturity also saw the rise of another major movement in the arts that was definitely English. The ‘Picturesque’, a critical concept that had been increasing in authority for two generations in England, received the dignity of a capital P in the 1790s. The term Romantic Classicism is a twentieth-century historian’s invention, attempting by its own contradictoriness to express the ambiguity of the dominant mode of this period in the arts; the term Picturesque, on the other hand, was most widely used and the concept most thoroughly examined just before and just after 1800 (see Chapters 1 and 6).

To the twentieth century, on the whole, the aesthetic standards of Romantic Classicism—or perhaps one should rather say the visual results—have been widely acceptable. The results of the application of Picturesque principles in architecture, on the other hand, have not been so generally admired; indeed, until lately the more clearly and unmistakably buildings realized Picturesque ideals, the less was usually the esteem in which they were held by posterity. On the whole, in architecture if not in landscape design, the twentieth century has preferred to see the manifestations of the Picturesque around 1800 as aberrations from a norm considered primarily to have been a ‘Classical Revival’. As the adjectival aspect of the term Romantic Classicism makes evident, however, the Classicism of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was not at all the same as that of the High Renaissance, nor even that of the Academic Reaction of the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. Romantic Classicism aimed not so much towards the ‘Beautiful’, in the sense of Aristotle and the eighteenth-century aestheticians, as towards what had been distinguished by Edmund Burke in 1756 as the ‘Sublime’.

Posterity has admired in the production of the first decades of the nineteenth century a homogeneity of style which is in fact even more illusory than that of earlier periods. Horrified by the chaos of later nineteenth-century eclecticism, two twentieth-century have praised architects and patrons of the years before and after 1800 for a consistency that was by no means really theirs. In some ways, and not unimportant ways, the history of architecture within the period covered by this volume seems to come full circle so that the Austrian art historian Emil Kaufmann could in 1933 write a book entitled Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. Kaufmann did not live quite long enough to realize how far from the spheres and cubes of the Ledolcian ideal the revolutionary twentieth-century architect would move in these last years (see Chapter 23). Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp, completed in 1955 after Kaufmann’s death, seems more in accord with extreme eighteenth-century illustrations of the Picturesque than with characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism (Plate 167). Yet in the early works of the American Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1890s and those of the German Mies van der Rohe twenty years later a filiation to early nineteenth-century Classicism can be readily traced; that tradition informed almost the entire production of the French Perret, a good deal of that of the German Behrens, and even some of the best late work of the Austrian Wagner (see Chapters 18-21).

Forgetting for the moment the Picturesque, one may profitably set down here some of the characteristics that the aspirations and the achievements of the architects of 1800 share, or seem to share, with those of the architects of over a century later. The preference for simple geometrical forms and for smooth, plain surfaces is common to both, though the earlier men aimed at effects of unbroken mass and the later ones rather at an expression of hollow volume. The protestations of devotion to the ‘functional’ are similar, if as frequently sophistical in the one case as in the other. The preferred isolation of buildings in space is as evident in the ubiquitous temples of the early nineteenth century as in the towering slabs of the mid twentieth. Monochromy and even monotony in the use of homogeneous wall-surfacing materials and the avoidance of detail in relief is balanced in both periods by an emphasis on direct structural expression, whether the structure be the posts and lintels of a masonry colonnade or the steel or ferro-concrete members of a continuous space-cage. Finally, impersonality and, perhaps even more notably, ‘internationality’ of expression provided around 1800 a universalized sense of period rather than the flavours of particular nations or regions, just as they have done in the last forty years.

The full flood of Romantic Classicism came late, having been dammed so long by the political and economic turmoil of the last years of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth; it also continued late, in some areas even beyond 1850. But dissatisfaction and revolt also started early; it is not a unique stylistic paradox that the greatest masters of Romantic Classicism were often those who were also most ready to explore the alternative possibilities of the Picturesque (see Chapter 6). The architectural production of the first half of the nineteenth century cannot therefore be presented with any clarity in a single chronological sequence. Parallel architectural events, even strictly contemporary works by the same architect, must be set in their proper places in at least two different sequences of development.

The building production of the early decades of the century already divides only too easily under various stylistic headings. A Greek Revival, a Gothic Revival, etc., have fact, these and other ‘revivals’ were but aspects either of the dominant Romantic Classical tide or of the Picturesque countercurrent (see Chapters 1-5 and Chapter 6, respectively). Only the story of the increasing exploitation of new materials, notably iron and glass, reaching some sort of a culmination around 1850, lay outside, though never quite isolated from, the realm of the revivalistic modes (see Chapter 7).