While Pevsner's and Giedion's views have been vehemently at- was so often characterized by modernists seeking to exorcize

g to exorcize one of the

tacked and critiqued, and have themselves become objects ofhistorical period's greatest legacies to our own-cultural anxiety--this period was
study, very few overarching interpretations of the period 175o-xs 90 one of continual experimentation on the very nature of architecture, its
have been offered to fill the void left by these discredited polemical his- capacity to represent and to communicate, even its capacity to affect
t?ries, although sn1dies of key figures, buildings, and aspects of the pe- and mould behaviour. By its very diversity, architecture in the nine-
nod have proliferated. Synthetic studies have largely been formulated teenth century sought to expand its capacity to accommodate new de-
as national histories of architecture, thus confirming over and over mands of a rapidly evolving society and societal consciousness, and its
again one of the most characteristic constructs of the nineteenth cen- flexibility to respond to new visions and insights of a society's place in
tury: the nation-state as the organizer of experience and identity. It is the larger order of things, whether historical, natural, or social.
certainly a daunting task to attempt to break out of that scenario, with Three interlocking themes characterize the architecture of this pe-
all its conveniences of ready-made historical subdivisions as well as a riod and will structure its assessment here: (r) a fundamentally new vi-
certain parallelism between political, social, and artistic events. Even sion of the relationship of architecn1re to the historical past, (z)
as Europe struggles in our time to reinvent itself, it might seem fool - architecture's response to the explosion of scientific inquiry, not simply
hardy to use such a continental scope in an account of architecture in into the natural realm, but into humanity itself, as the sciences of man
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, riven as those centuries were sought an equivalent status to the emerging natural sciences-a term
by political, economic, and cultural rivalries. And it is certainly beyond itself invented over the course of the period, and (J) the emergence of
the scope of these introductory volumes to venture a new account with new publics for architecture in a period of social and economic revolu-
the rich texture of details of national surveys, or even the much longer tion and nation-building.
survey books of the z96os and 1970s that set out to map this period
more objectively as the modernist project came under attack in both Architecture and history
architecture and historiography. I think here of Henry-Russell It is characteristic of the new historical consciousness ushered in by
Hitchcock's Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the such pioneering works as Montesquieu's The Spirit ofthe Laws (1747)
Pelican History of Art, last revised in 1977, and Robin Middleton and and Voltaire's The Century ofLouis XIV (r751) that the attempt to under-
David Watkin's lively Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture, stand the nature of historical time as a process oflawful evolution and
first issued in Italian in the same year, both of which remain valuable change was continually motivated by a desire to change the present.
r~ference tools even if they were composed more as a collage of na- The great revolution in archaeological studies, themselves the bedrock
tlOnal chapters. The approach here is thematic, and it is hoped that this upon which the stylistic experiments generally referred to as
book will offer a reading of the period under study that will prove stim- Neoclassicism were grounded, was fuelled by a longing for fundamental
ulating not only for those studying it for the first time, but for the many laws for making and criteria for judging architecture. More than any
engaged in its ongoing reappraisal. other medium, architecture embodied poignantly the period's quest to
combine an understanding of progress and change with a consensus on
Key themes and issues truth, a relating of the eternal and relative that remained one of the fun-
The fundamental hypothesis might be summarized thus: ushered in by damental quests of the period's myriad philosophies of human, and
the great period ofintellectual questioning which historians have called even natural, history. Although the vision of the shape of time was to
the Enlightenment and fuelled by the social, political, and economic change radically over the course of the period, the fundamental belief
upheavals and challenges of a century and a half continually made that an understanding of the place of the present in a larger orderly
aware, anxious even, of the changes that separated it from the past, ar- progress of time was a prerequisite to creating an appropriate ethics, be
chitecture after 1750 became self-consciously experimental as never be- it ofgovernment, society, or architecture, was held in common through-
fore. Continually testing its own limits, the possibilities and capacities out the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the pages that fol-
of architecture were questioned, expanded, and debated as an integral low the phenomena of revivalism and eclecticism, the self-conscious
part of those processes of secular human reason, of scientific observa- examination of the historical category of style in architecture, will be ex-
tion and experimentation, that characterized the Enlightenment in amined as a by-product of this great revolution in the status ofhistorical
philosophy and in science. This led to an unprecedented range ofarchi- knowledge.
tectural solutions and experiments, of competing visions and theories,
even ofbold blueprints. Far from being an era ofstodgy 'revivalism' as it

2 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION J
Architecture and scientific inquiry new and unprecedented building types and raskc; developed with in-
From the publication in 1749 of the first volume of Buffon's Natural creasing rapidity. Museums, public theatres, public libraries, halls of
1/istory, e\'en inquiry into the natural realm wa!-. to be framed histori- le~ic;lative assembly, and later railway stations, department srores, and
cally. \Vhile the nineteenth cenrury would e•(plor(; at length the rela- buildings for exhibition~ and fairs, all made their appearance tor the
tions between systems of classification and analysis in the natural first time during this period. The invention of the building type and irs
sciences, the eighteenth century, in its great admiration for the public went hand in hand. Although this was the fiN period to create a
'\lc\vtonian revolution in scientific reasoning, .., a$ most eager to put a theory of architecture a!> one of the most immediate reflections of the
whole range of'sciences of man' on an equal footing with the new stan :-pecificity of historical and geographical c;etting, it was abo one of the
dards of objectivity, observation, and lawfulness which characterized first to confront self-consciously the challenges ot\olving architectural
investigation of the universe and its workings. Built on Locke's premise programmes that had never before been formulated. Not surprisingly,
that all knowledge was derived through the c;en,arions, sensationalist in doing so the joint concern~ of following historical law and learning
philosophy opened up the whole realm of human emotional response, from the methods of science were enlisted. ~one of the themes singled
knowledge, and ultimately even morality to scientific experimentation out here, from the intellectual revolution ofhistorical studies to Lhc rise
and inquiry. This was ro cause a profound reconsideration of the do- of a new public consciousness, can be pursued in isolation.
main of the aesthetic. Natural philosoph}; as science was still called l n the two decades since the last significant attempt to take ~tock of
early in the period, thus framed a whole new 'objecrive' basis for explor- this complex period was published, a veritable olv;tlanche of research
ing the 11t1ture of architectural form, its effect on the senses, and ulti- has continually expanded the canon of architects, buildings, and even
mately on behaviour. From this descriptive ethos of contemporary counlries which contribute to the vibrant culture of architecture in late
· ewtonian' social science, the political and social potential of the mal- eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe..\n attempt has been
leability of human behaviour was postulated. Sensarionalist man, objec- made to represent this wealth in the bibliography at the end of this vol-
tively described, became the premise for behavioural, social, and even ume. More importantly, efforts to view the period thnmgh new
political reform. I n the context of the economic, technological, and po- methodological lenses offered by an increasing!) self-questioning dis-
litical revolutions of the late eighteenth century, this new in'itrumental cipline of art history have been sketched in various thematic -.rudie-,
potential ofarchitecture was a powerful legacy to be studied throughout m.ln) taking their questions for the first time from outside the disci-
the nineteenth century as science increasingly came to rival history in pline of architecture itself. From the social history of art of the late
explanation!> ofboth the natural and the social realm. Onl} at the end of 196o-. and t9;-os to analyses of architecture itself as an ideological in-
the nineteenth century did new theories of subjectivity lead to a funda- strument in the wake of the vivid iotere!'!t of architectural historians in
mental re-evaluation ofboth architectural form and its audience. the work of post-structuralists, the period's transitional status ha~ be-
come rich for analysis rather than a roadblock to understanding. It is
A new audience for architecture hoped that this book is at once a record of some of the shifts ofempha-
If architect~ came to frame investigation of their work in term~ that sis and interpretation that have been opened up both within and adja-
placed architectural design as one of the constituent elements both cent to the field of architectural history and criticism, and a suggestive
shaping and shaped by events, debates, and ideologies, this was a pe- charting of a new set of themes for further work.
riod, roo, which saw an ever-\-videning public for architecntre.l n a bur- The chapters that follow are organized both thematically and
geoning world of printed pamphlets, expanding salon and chronologically. There is therefore inevitably a certain amount of mov-
coffee-house culture, and open debate over the nature of authority and ing back and forth in time as the chapters somt:times pursue a theme
citizenship, architecture was subject for the first time to professional over several decades. An individual architect's work will at times be
criticism, framed outside the traditional power of ruler'i, aristocrat~, discussed in more than one chapter and cross-references to illustra-
and the church. The increased political, social, and intellectual free tions will encourage readers to pursue themes and comparisons that
dom and power of a burgeoning bourgeoisie in Western Europe, as cannot be fully taken up in this introduction to the period. Each chap-
well as the engagement of any number of rulers from th~ German ter seeks to elucidate in some depth one or two seminal buildings, con-
states to Ru~si;t with the Enlightenment's open questioning of the lim- sidered not onl} as ma~;rerpieces of an architectural author, but as
its and nature of autocratic rule, both fostered and in turn responded to diverse mirrors of the social, political, and cultural situation of a given
a revolution in the history of architectural programmes. '\Jot only did moment and place.
architect:. turn their attention to a much \vider range ofbUlldmgs, but

4 I'TRODUC'IIO:-. I 'TRODUL' I 10]'; 5

 Neoclassicism:
Science,
Archaeology, and
the Doctrine of
Progress
Architecture and the Enlightenment

1 In the mid-eighteenth century, antiquity was upheld as a standard for

architecture as never before. At first glance the quest to extend both the
scope and the depth of understanding of the classical language which
had dominated European architectural expression since the fifteenth
century might seem a fulfilment of Renaissance ideals rather than a
critical new departure. But the Europe-wide movement, often labelled
Neoclassicism, was anything but a revival; it represented rather a fun-
damental investigation of the very bases of architectural form and
meaning. Debates over the origins and authority of the Classical orders
were given a new impetus by the climate of analytical inquiry initiated
both by the Newtonian revolution in science and by the probing de-
ployment of reason in the fields of philosophy, history, and social cri-
tique in Enlightenment thought. This fascination with origins would
motivate two, sometimes contradictory, lines of investigation, one
philosophical and best exemplified by the rigorist writings and teach-
ings of the Abbe Laugier in Paris and ofFra Carlo Lodoli in Venice,
the other historical and motivating a new zeal for recording at first
hand the physical remains of antiquity. In the 1750s an alliance between
archaeological exploration and architectural theory was inaugurated
which would continue through the nineteenth century.
France, largely through the prestige of its national Academy of
Architecture, gained a new primacy in architectural theory during
these years. Two events set the stage intellectually for architectural de-
bate in the middle decades of the century when built production was
slowed first by the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48) and then the
Seven Years' War (1756-63): the publication in 1750 of the prospectus
Detail of 11 for Didcrot and d'Alembert's Encyclopidie, and the lectures in the same

9
year at the Sorbonne given by the encyclopaedist, philosopher, and 1 Charles Eisen
Frontisp ece for the second
physiocrat Anne-Robert Turgor, notably his Philosophic Panorama of
ed1bon of Marc·Ant01ne
the Progress ofthe Human Mind. Diderot's hesitation over the place ar- (Abbe) Laugier's Essay on
chitecture should occupy in the system of knowledge which organized Architecture, Pans, 1755
Clutching a compass and right
the encyclopaedia-whether it was more properly placed under the
angle, and reclln1ng on the
faculty of reason or that of imagination-reopened an ancient debate elements of an 1on1c order. the
that subsequent generations would play out as they sought to align ar- muse of architecture d~rects
attention away from the
chitecture's power to move and shape users' responses alternately with preoccupatiOI'I of earlier
rhetoric and poetry or the growing prestige of science. The explosion treabses w•th harmon1ous
of architectural research, travel, and publishing after 1750 was launched proport1ons and towards a
more essential truth of
in the spirit ofDiderot's determination to examine every domain freed structural clanty embodied in
from the shackles of tradition, ofchurch dogma, and of received super- mankind's f~rst structure.
stition. In the spirit of Voltaire and ofTurgot, whose commitment to
progress would colour the entire period, architects grappled with the
overarching challenge of Enlightenment philosophy: how to reconcile
the quest for primary eternal truths with a growing awareness of the
relativity and contingency of man's cultural expressions. How could
one conceive an architecture which responded both to reason and to
that spirit of progress and, additionally, to that of cultural relativity ar-
ticulated by 1\lontesquieu who, in his widely read Spirit ofthe Laws of
1747, had established that societies were as much the products oflocal
laws of climate, system of government, and traditions as they were of
unchanging human nature?
Battles over relative and absolute truths and the respective merit of
ancient models and modern innovations had erupted periodically in
the French Academy of Architecture since its founding in 1671, most
famously in the debates over Claude Perrault's challenge to the author-
ity of the Classical orders and their systems of proportion, set down in
the commentaries to his 1673 French translation of Vitruvius's Ten
Books on Architecture. By the 1750s the decades-old 'quarrel of the an-
cients and moderns' was being played out in the lively arena of essays,
pamphlets, and journals, breaching the walls of the Academy to find a
place in the literary salons and coffee houses that were new centres of
debate among a limited, but expanding, reading public.

The battle of the ancients vs the moderns and Laugier's

rationalist theory
In publishing his polemicalEssayonArchitecture(r753) as an anonymous
pamphlet, the Jesuit priest and amateur aesthetician .l\larc-Antoine
Laugier (1713- 69) divorced these debates from antiquarian exchange which time an English translation had appeared and a German version
and introduced them into a Parisian marketplace of ideas already abuzz was in preparation-Laugier answered his critics and added the famous
with challenges to prevailing tastes, both for the decorative Rococo in frontispiece [1] of the primitive hut which encapsulated his theory in al-
aristocratic interiors and an ltalianizing academic Baroque tradition in legorical form. The hut had been a standard feature ofarchitectural the-
church design. These fashions were attacked not in the name of taste ory since Vitruvius; but never before had it been proposed as anything
alone, but primarily of reason. Signing a second edition in qss-by more than a fanciful story of the primitive origins of architecture.

IO NEOCLASSICISM THE BATTLE OF THE ANCIENTS VS THE MODERNS II

Laugier's radical step was to propose this origin as a moment of higher sual judgements, Laugier's logic became a form of operable criticism.
truth: 'All the splendors of architecture ever conceived have been mod- His principles were endowed with the simplicity that the
eled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the Enlightenment associated with nature's laws. Pilasters were proscribed
simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and as 'bizarre', arcades as 'vicious', and columns on pedestals as 'against na-
true perfection is achieved'1 An irreducible construct of logic, the hut ture'. Pediments were to be used only when they corresponded to a slop-
was to be emulated, not copied. It provided a norm of procedure rather ing roof; never as a mere device for crowning a fas:ade. Superimposed
than a model, an answer to the quest for what Laugier calls 'fixed and orders should never represent several storeys on the exterior when this is
unchanging laws'. not the case within.
Laugier's thought was deeply affected by recent philosophy, not Not that Laugier advocated the application offree-standing temple
only in his constant appeal to reason, but in his belief that the hut itself, fronts to all classes of buildings. The Essay upheld the academic deco-
although a first construct of man, could be accorded the status almost rum of convenance or appropriateness, and its sense of a hierarchy of
of a natural law. His work parallels in striking ways the contemporary building types by function and social class. And Laugier postulates
development of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's early work in which nature beautiful buildings even without orders, for as he admits, not everyone
was lauded as a corrective to the artifice of evolved society, most fa- can afford columns! Only the three Grecian orders were condoned, al-
mously in the 1755 Discourse on the Origin ofInequality, with its figure of though he hinted that in the future new orders might be devised. Are-
the noble savage as the type of man in a natural, almost secular, state of turn to origins was by no means an impediment to progress; rather it
grace. Rousseau himself admitted that this original man was purely was an essential first step. Although his normative vision of nature par-
imaginary, just as Laugier was unconcerned to document the real exis- allels Rousseau's, Laugier did not envision an architecture critical of
tence of the hut. Laugier's was not a work of archaeology, history, or the reigning social order. His was the more limited agenda of reform-
even of allegory, but rather of philosophical aesthetics. The first hut ing taste and allowing the light of reason to illuminate a subject that
embodied in its simplicity a process of imitation that could reform ar- had, he felt, become encumbered by tradition and rules.
chitecture and ground it again in reason. It already comprised all the el-
ements of architecture: upright column, spanning entablature and The Graeco-Gothic synthesis and the debate over the ideal
protective sloping roof. All else was licence, the products ofcivilization church
rather than nature. Such elements as walls, necessary for protection but As Laugier sought to accommodate the Grecian model to modern de-
not for structural support, were never to be employed unaware of their mands, he was led to the challenging idea that French Gothic architec-
artifice or without deference to these primary elements. His notion of ture, for which he otherwise shared the period's disdain, might none
function was strictly one of construction rather than of usc or pro- the less offer lessons for achieving a light and airy structural aesthetic.
gramme. 'By imitating the natural process, art was born,'2 Laugier as- The notion of a Gracco-Gothic synthesis had been anticipated in ear-
serted, dismissing what he viewed as the superficial imitations of the lier treatises, by Michel de Fremin (Mimoires critiques d'architecture,
outward appearances of nature in the Rococo and establishing the 1702) and Jean-Louis Cordemoy (Nouveau traiti de toute /'architecture,
Greek temple as the first example of the application of a natural law of 1706), both of whom proposed an ideal church of free-standing
structural reasoning. Columns, for instance, taper because plants do, as columns and entablatures supporting vaulting above, all brought to-
well as in relation to the load they carry. 'Let us keep to the simple and gether with the structural precision of Gothic construction, which they
the natural, it is the only road to beauty,' 1 Laugier concludes, establish- heralded as supremely rational.
ing ethical criteria of truth which would have a long life in modern ar- As Laugier was writing, these ideas were being explored by two ar-
chitectural theory. chitects,Jacques-Germain Souffiot (1713-80) and Pierre Contant d'Ivry
The Essay unleashed a fury of rebuttals; but as a revolutionary tract it (r698-1777), both of whom would be entrusted in the qsos with major
was heralded immediately. Even that great advocate of moderation, Parisian church commissions that offered a testing-ground for these
Jacques-Frans:ois Blondel (1705/4), whose influential private school of theoretic propositions of uniting a monumental Classical revival with a
architecture, founded in 1743, was to foster many of the most innovative progressive and experimental architecture. As early as 1741 Soufflot de-
talents of the next generation, notably C.-N. Ledoux and William livered an altogether surprising discourse on Gothic architecture before
Chambers, recommended it to his students. Although accessible to a the Academy of Lyon. A decade later Contant d'lvry began exploring
broad audience, Laugier underscored that his main aim was to form the the theme of a Graeco-Gothic synthesis in building with St-Vasnon at
taste of architects. Coupled with Blondel's use of site visit:; to hone vi- Condc-sur-l'Escaut (begun 1751) and St-Vaast at Arras (begun 1753),

t2 NEOCLASSICISM TIIF: CRAECO-GOTHIC SYNTHESIS AND THE D E BATE 0\' ER THE IDEAL C HURCH IJ
2 Johann Friedrich Dauthe simplicity' of Greek art as an unrivalled standard in his Reflections on
Nrkolarkrrche, Lerpzrg, 1784 the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, published in
The fancrful remodellmg of
thiS medreval parish church, D resden in 1755. \Vinckclmann's renowned but paradoxical assertion
in which Classteal fluted that 'there is but one way for the moderns to become great, even inim-
columns support rrbbed itable; I mean, by imitating the Greeks',' was an early tremor in one of
vaults, seems to have taken rts
inspr ratron rndrrectly from the most sustained polemical exchanges of the century, the Greek vs
l augrer's suggestion of Roman controversy. The epicentre remained Rome, to which a cos-
'columns formed like thick mopolitan world of antiquarians, touring aristocrats, and royalty, as
trunks of palm· trees
spreadrng the•r branches ...' well as architects of the most diverse nationalities, travelled. The de-
as •I had been paraphrased by bates, engaged on Classical ground and reinforced by archaeological
the Venetran R•gonst
Francesco M•liz•a rna treatise
pilgrimages to Paestum, Greece, Dalmatia, and even Syria, soon rever-
recently translated •nto berated in the centres of architectural thought and practice in Paris,
German, evidence of the rapid London, and Berlin, as well as in numerous smaller courts from Parma
and extens•ve d•ffus1011 of
l augier's rdeas rn Europe. to Copenhagen where architects- especially those from the French
Academy in Rome-were solicited by rulers on the Grand Tour to re-
form building and artistic training.
Archaeological research, travel, and publication in the 1750s and
176os, much undertaken in fierce intellectual and personal competi-
tion, was driven as much by a concern to reform contemporary taste as
to deepen knowledge of the Classical world. Discovery of the lost cities
of Herculaneum (1739) and Pompeii (1748) revealed that antique cul-
ture had been but partially understood and recorded. The influence of
these ancient cities lost to Vesuvius was principally to be felt ill a taste
both in French Flanders where the tradition of the hall church provided
prototypes for these attempts to rival the openness of Gothic space with
Piranesi and the Grand Tour
the forms and monumentality of Classical construction.
G iovanni Battista Pirancsi (I720f8) was born ncar Venice, trained as an architect
The theme of a possible synthesis of two architectures-styles long and absorbed the radical thought ofLodoli. In Rome after 1740 he began engraving
considered antithetical but now upheld as parallel rational structural views of the city and its ruins, capturing the imaginations and purses of artists and
models, one in Classical trabeation, the other in medieval arcuation- aristocrats on the Grand Tour.
represented a notion ripe with significance for the revival of the pro- The Grand Tour, an increa,ingly canonical tour of~ lcditcranncan culture and
gressive 'modern' position and would echo in historicist architectural antiquities, studded with the acquisition ofboth art trca,urc~ and social graces, was to
<erve also as one of the great motor.. of the dissemination of'\eoclassical taste,
thought for the next century. In Observations on Architecture (r765)
particularly among the Engli~h. Piranesi's powerful pictorial ~tyle transformed
Laugier pursued his ideas to even more radical conclusions, proposing perception of the rutned remains of the Romw, Etruscan, and eventually even Greek
that the emulation of branching trees could lead to an altogether novel past for several generation~ of artists, architects, and clients. Inspired by Baroque
architecture. This idea had only limited direct influence, most strik- stage-craft, particularly dramatic low and oblique viewpoints, Piranesi favoured
ingly in the curiously beautiful and paradoxically Rococo rendering of dramatic chiaroscuro shading. He particularly influenced students at the French
Laugier's ideas in Johann Friedrich D authe's remodelling of St Academy, across from his shop in the Corso. As an architect he remodelled two
churches in Rome, the eccentric church for the Order ofMalta, Santa Maria del
Nicholas, Leipzig [2] around 1784. Priorato (1764) on the Aventine Hill, and Stjohn the Lateran.

The rediscovery of Greece Selected books

Opertt l11rit'(l;'50)
'Architecture owes all that is perfect to the Greeks,'4 Laugier asserted in Antichita Rommu (1756)
1753, echoing a growing French commonplace, although he had never De/It' Afognijianu tdArchilt'ttura dt' Romani (1761)
seen a Greek temple at first hand. Neither for that matter had that Campo Morzio (1762), dedicated to Robert Adam
German antiquarian and pioneering historian of art, Johann Joachim Diverse moniere d'adornart i cnmmini (1769)
Winckelmann (I7Ij68), who extolled the 'quiet grandeur and noble

I4 NEOCLASSICISM TilE REDISCOVERY OF GREECE 15

3 Gabriel-Pierre-Martin 4 in the end they highlighted important differences between Greek and
Dumont James Stuart sketching the Roman buildings, hitherto considered stages in the refinement of a sin-
The Temple of Neptune Erechtheoon on the Acropohs,
1751
gle canon. Setting out to endow architecture with absolute authority,
Paestum, 1764
The French architects Soufflot Stuart and Revett's expedition Stuart and Revem and Leroy unwittingly introduced notions ofvariety
and Dumont took to Ottoman-occupied Greece and fostered a debate over the relative merits of models. This, in turn,
measurements of the Greek provided the first accurately
measured engravongs of GreeK cast into high relief conflicting notions of the roles of imitation and in-
temples at Paestum during a
tnp to Italy 10 1750. The squat architecture. Stuart adopted vention in architectural design, the relation of modern culture to tradi-
proportions. tapenng profde, lOcal attore to ease hiS work. He tion, the nature of architectural progress, and the very matter of taste.
and 'promotive' detaohng of the was so determoned to extract
Done order there doffered an unadulterated V!Soon of Within a few years nearly all the key figures articulating both the ideol-
dramatically from the svelte antiqu1ty that he paod the ogy and the imagery of a Classical revival in architecture were drawn
Roman Done on which owner of a house abuttmg the
into this debate, from the fiery Venetian architect/artist Giovanni
Renaissance theones of famous Tower of the Winds for
beautiful proporbonswere the cost of demohtoon and Battista Piranesi (qzo/8), already famous for his engravings of there-
based and contnbuted to the reconstruction that he might mains of ancient Rome, to the German Winckelmann, now keeper of
risi ng cris1s of faith 1n a free the Hellen1St1c monument
momentanly from later
antiquities at the Villa Albani in Rome, and to the Scotsman Allan
timelessCiassocal1dea1.
accretions. Ramsey (1713-84) who in 1755 published his 'Dialogue on Taste' anony-
mously in The Investigator, setting Greece over Rome as the source of
excellence in the arts.
Personal rivalries between architectural travellers were soon
coloured by nascent nationalism. The English Society of Dilettanti,
for Pompeiian style in decorative arts and interior decoration. This founded in 1733-34 to promote foreign travel and 'Greek taste and
began with Robert Wood and James Dawkins's publications of the an- Roman spirit' among gentlemen and artists alike, had provided a small
cient Roman cities of Palmyra and Balbec in the Levant (The Ruins of subsidy to Stuart and Revett. The enterprise, they hoped, would turn a
Palmyra, London, 1753 and The Ruins ofBalbec, London, 1757). It con- profit, reform taste, and even bring glory to England. Difficult work-
tinued with the quest to publish accurate measured drawings from the
Greek mainland; a series ofluxurious plate books made views oflong-
fabled monuments available both to form the taste of patrons and in-
form the compositions of architects. The superiority of Greek culture,
and the exemplary beauty of the Athenian Parthenon in particular,
were largely articles of faith, since few had made the difficult voyage to
the Ottoman-ruled peninsula. As travellers to the ancient Greek
colony ofPaestum, south of Naples [3], and then to the Peloponnese
returned with measured drawings, discrepancies between Greek and
Roman monuments caused a major questioning of the creed of a uni-
tary Classical ideal.

The rivalry of Stuart and Revett with Leroy

James Stuart (1713-88) and Nicholas Revert's (172o-r8o4) pioneering
Antiquities ofAthens, conceived as early as 1748, was overtaken by several
parallel and rival undertakings by the time their first volume appeared in
London in q6z [4], notably, and much to Stuart's chagrin, by the
Frenchman Julien D avid Leroy's Ruins ofthe Most Beautiful Monuments
of Greece, rushed into publication in 1758. Each project was initially
framed simply to expand the corpus of sources beyond Antoine
Desgodet's Antiquites de Rome (r68z), which had long been the unri-
valled source for measured drawings of ancient monuments. However,

16 "'EOCLASSICIS~1 THE RIVALRY OF STUART A1\0 REVF.TT WITH LF.ROY I]

ing conditions Jed Stuart and Revert to abandon their plan of giving 5 James Stuart
priority to the key Periclean monuments of the Acropolis, and scrupu- Done Temple at Hagley.
Worcestersh1re. 1758
lous standards of accuracy kept them in Athens for 3 years. When their Tile reproduction of h1stoncal
first volume at last appeared (the fourth and last was issued only in architecture found 1ts easteSt
r8r8), many, including \Vinckelmann, admitted disappointment in applicat&on •n small garden
pav11ions where recollect•ons
finding smaller monuments illustrated rather than the Parthenon, of other times and places
Erechtheion and Propylaeum, all of which might have substantiated added a dimens1on of world
travel and the universe of
Winckclman n's theory ofdirect causal relations between Greek artistic
knowledge to the expenence
perfection and the social, political, and topographical context of the of nature m the evolv1ng
Periclean achievement. Historical analysis was not remotely part of aesthet•c of the English
picturesque landscape style.
Stuart and Revert's conception. Wo:h the almost prec10us sea e
Leroy (1724-1803) from the first envisioned Greek monuments as o' th s buokllng. architecture
existing in a larger context, even travelling to Constantinople during wasessenllallyon dosplay

his 1754- 5 tour to see at first hand a broad range of post-antique monu-
ments. At the French Academy in Rome from 1751 to 1754 he formed 6 Julien David Leroy lowed. J tDctaposed with Shugborough's earlier pavilions evoking China
View of the Propylaea Athens,
contacts in the circle of the Comte de Caylus (x692- I76s), a wealthy an- Les ruines des plus beaux
and its newly created rustic ruins, Stuart's travel souvenirs entered a
tiquarian and collector whose researches were lavishly published as monuments de Ia Grece, complex visual discourse of accurate but discrete historical images,
Recueil d'antiquites egyptiennes, etrusques, grecques, romaines et gaulloises Pans, 1758 evocations ofdistant times and places in which Greece was but one of a
The first to publish a survey of
(1752-65), the first work to treat ancient monuments as historical testa- ancient Greek monuments.
series of cultures identified with distinctive styles. For Anson's London
ments. vVith Caylus's support, Leroy enlisted some of the leading ar- Leroy Juxtaposed poctureSQue residence, Litchfield House, StJames's Square (1764), Stuart intro-
chitects of the day to engrave his drawings and consulted the historian voews of the ruons and detaoled duced a columnar front with pediment and the novel forms of the
measured plates of the orders
Abbe Bathelemey on his text. By the time it appeared in 1758, his book w1th a handful of newly recorded Grecian Ionic order of the Erechtheion, an advertise-
too had taken on the aura of a national project. reconstructions 1n whoch he ment at once for Anson's refined taste and for Stuart's contributions to
Stuart and Revett devoted most of their short introduction to lam- unabashedly 'corrected' the
erudite aristocratic culture.
monumentsaccordrng to the
basting Leroy for inaccuracies; Leroy retorted in a revised edition modern vision of Classical Leroy made clear from the outset that models of imitation were
(r77o) that 'The ruins of ancient buildings can be envisioned from very ant1q u1ty as a model of never his intent, although he provided measured drawings and pic-
symmetry, regularity. and
different perspectives . . . to servilely provide measurements'6 had mposing scale.
turesque views of Athenian monuments [6]. Proposing an intimate re-
never, he claimed, been his intent. Radically different notions about lationship between the evolution of society and architectural
the value of archaeological knowledge for modern architecture were
reflected in these disputes. Debate quickly focused on whether or not
ancient monuments were to be studied in order to approach a greater
fidelity in reproducing the different ornaments and parts of the
Classical orders or to gain insight into how civilizations gave rise to ar-
chitectural forms. This, in turn, should guide the quest for a modern
architecture worthy of the same respect and authority as antique archi-
tecturc.
Stuart demonstrated one use of his plates in his own designs, repro-
ducing, for example, the baseless Doric order of the Parthenon and the
Thesius in garden pavilions at Hagley Park in Worcestershire in 1758
[5] and creating, the following year, a stunning interior at Spencer
House in London replete with reproductions of ancient Greek furni-
ture designs. For Thomas Anson, a founding member of the Society of
Dilettanti, Stuart created a nearly identical temple in the landscape
garden at Shugborough in Staffordshire, where follies based on the
Tower of the Winds and of the Arch of I I adrian in Athens soon fol-

r8 NEOCLASSICISM TH£ RIVALRY OF STUART AND REVETT WITH LEROY 19

elements-most particularly the Doric order for which he proposed
three distinct phases-Leroy married the concerns of architectural
aesthetics and standards with the new history of Voltaire and Turgot.
Greek architecture is analysed as a piece with Greek society, Greek
learning, even Greek science, suggesting a kind of coherence in cul-
tural forms that was a more valuable lesson for modern cultural identity
than the specific forms of the orders. But Leroy went further, situating
progress in Greek culture within a larger panorama of architectural de-
velopments, offering the image of a historical chain in which the
Greeks forged the key links between the Egyptians and the
Phoenicians on the one hand and the temples of the Christians,
reached via the Byzantine churches he had visited en route to Athens,
on the other. Leroy's research reflected an awareness of the current de-
bate on the ideal church, and suggested that the answer would come
not from a new canon of forms but from the evolutionary history ofar-
chitecture. The Greek temple was proposed not as an inviolate type of
perfection, but rather as a moment of harmony and perfection on a
longer developmental continuum. Leroy attributed the Greeks' artistic
excellence to favourable climate and social and political systems, but
unlike Winckelmann he did not endorse the notion that the Greeks
were unsurpassable. A longer view of the evolution of their achieve-
ments gave insight into the complex dynamics of historical change. By
the time of his second edition in 1770, Leroy's theory of architecture
was fully grounded in a theory of history. He sought, in the spirit of
Montesquieu, to distinguish between that which was specific to a given 7 Giovanni Battista Piranesi paranoid, in tone through the decade, he sought, largely in an instinc-
Tomb of the Scipios, from
societal configuration and that which was incontrovertibly universal. AntiChit.~ Romane II (17 56)
tive and reactive way, to define a theory of architecture. Piranesi argues
For the latter he drew on the latest elaboration of]ohn Locke's theory P1ranesi opened a that the Romans developed their architecture directly from the
ofhuman sensations to argue for universal laws of human response to generation's eyes to the Etruscans, an older race than the Greeks, who brought the arts to a
sublimity of Roman masonry,
the environment as a constant in a world of continual historical evolu- an aesthet1c and techn1ca1
state of impressive perfection when Greek civilization was still in its
tion. The new history of artistic styles and the quest for absolute laws achievement he procla1med infancy. H e celebrated Etruscan skill in construction, claiming that
superiOr to and autonomous such great works of infrastructure as the Cloaca Maxima, the aque-
of architecture were momentarily allied; Leroy shared Laugier's quest
from Greek architecture. and
for laws but he focused architects' attention on the study of real rather a taste in counterpoint to the ducts, circuses, and roads were all foundations upon which the Roman
than mythic artefacts. open frame of Laug1er's V1S1on. Empire later built its engineering prowess. The Etruscans, he asserted
lndeed.laug•er's theory 1s
with little concern for historical documentation, learned the art of
here subtly attacked 1n the
The battle of the Greeks vs the Romans and Piranesi wooden hut to the nght of the monumental building in stone directly from the Egyptians. Next to
Stuart's anger paled in comparison to the ire Leroy's promotion of great circular tomb, 1ts thin, this rugged tradition, the Greeks offered an almost effete concern with
open structure held m place
Greek excellence drew from the famous print-maker and cicerone now by X-shaped braces r1)I
beauty. Their architecture was concerned more with ornaments than
Piranesi. Having based his fortune on promoting Roman antiquities, the essence of architecture as a structure, echoing perhaps something
Piranesi viewed Winckelmann's claims, followed by Leroy's illustra- of the rigorist thinking developed in Venice by Lodoli and his follow-
tions, as a threat to both his national pride and his personal livelihood. ers in the 1740s. Carried away by the strength of his own rhetoric,
It spurred him to new artistic and polemical brilliance in 38 plates gath- Piranesi even asserted that Greek influence was a principal factor in
ered together in 1761 under the polemical title Ofthe Magnificence and Roman architecture's decline from reason to caprice in the late empire,
the Architecture of Rome, powerfully recording the sublime scale and when Greek workmen and fashion permeated Italian culture [7].
power of Roman architecture. In a lengthy text, the first of a series of Piranesi's nascent nationalism, over a century before Italian unifica-
bombastic polemical writings that became increasingly shrill, even tion, was soon echoed in Etruscan academies that sprang up in Latium

20 NEOCLASSICISM THE BATTLE OF THE GREEKS VS THE ROMANS AND PI RANES! ZI

8Piranesi
Preparatory study for Parere
su l'archltettura,
(Kunstb,bllothek. Berlin).
c.l765
With a brash and impass1oned
plea for ong1nality 1n
arch11ecture. P1ranes1
1mag1ned an arch1tectural
language drawn from a w1de
vanety of architectural sources
all governed by the
compoS1\IOnal1magmat1on of
the md1V1dual designer.

gpr;anesi of architecture a vile trade in which one simply copies without discre-
Temple of Neptune as tion'. Four years later in a portfolio of his own fantastic designs for fire-
illustrated 1n Otfferentes vues
de quelques restes .. de places, Dijftrent Manners for Decorating Fireplaces and all other Parts of
ranctenne VIlle de Pesto. 1778 Buildings (1769), Piranesi summarized his position: ~ter having used
When he V1S1Ied the anctent Etruscan architecture through several centuries the Romans also had
Greek colony at Paestum.
south of Naples. near the end recourse to the Greek manner and united both. Similarly the modern
of hts life. Plri.Jnest was so architect must not be satisfied with being a faithful copyist of the an-
moved that he created some
cients, but based on the study of their works must display an inventive
of h1s most deeply fell and
nchly evocat1ve engrav1ngs, and-I am tempted to say-creative genius; and by wisely combining
capturing a sense of loommg the Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian styles, one must give rise to the dis-
monumentality and powerful
and Tuscany as local antiquarians began to reconstruct a nativist ge- play of I ghl and shadow on
covery of new decorations and new manners.' Perhaps the ultimate
nealogy for culture on Italian soil. these stout and rugged Done irony is that the forceful proportions and volumetric presence of the
columns. Greek Doric were to have their greatest influence only a decade after the
Imitation vs invention battle of the G reeks and Romans had subsided, inspired less by the
As the polemic gained adherents, Piranesi was led to issue one of the lengthy arguments of Leroy's second edition than by Piranesi's brilliant
most impassioned and ultimately moving pleas for the primacy ofartis- engravings of the Greek temples ofPaestum, first issued in 1778 [9).
tic genius and invention over rigid rules of imitation. The idiosyncratic
Parere su l'architettura (Views on Architecture) (1765) offers for the first Philosophy of history and the new church of Ste-Genevieve
time a series of his own architectural compositions [8] in which here- Leroy's progressive vision of history and Piranesi's brilliant visualiza-
veals an imagination unfettered by archaeological precedent, a position tion of the power of ancient architecture came together in the church
advanced with a brilliant sense of irony on the frontispiece, which cites ofSte-Genevieve, whose design and construction remained at the cen-
without acknowledgement a quip from Leroy's own polemical ex- tre of French architectural debate for over 30 years, even as its monu-
changes with Stuart and Revett: 'In order not to make of the sublime art mental Corinthian portico and tall dome dominated the skyline of

22 c-;F.OCLASSICISM PIJILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND THE NFW CIIURCH OF STE-GF.NF.VIEYE ZJ

 10 J.-G. Soufflot Paris. The choice of Soufflot as architect, over the royal architect
Perspect1vev1ewof the- -
Ange-Jacques Gabriel (r698- r782), was a linchpin of the architectural
proJected church of Ste-
Genev1eve, Paris, 1757, politics of the Marquis de Vandieres, the future Marquis de Marigny,
engraved by J. C. Bel heard who since his appointment in 1751 as D irector of Royal Buildings, had
Soufflot's des1gn would evolve sought to realign taste to a purer vision of the antique. With this ap-
over the next 20 years, most
partiCularly in the design of the pointment Marigny married the revolution in taste with the politics of
dome; but from the f1rst the royal architecture, since the project of rebuilding the ancient and ven-
idea of combin1ng a Classical
erated church of Paris's patron saint was a key element in Louis xv's
temple port1co w1th the dome
charactensllc of the greatest quest to hone his image as a king of peace and beneficence for a trou-
churches of Christianity bled realm as well as to assert the independence of the Gallican church
reflected h1s not1on that a
modern architecture would
from Rome. Soufflot was not only well placed as Marigny's former
evolve from a synthetiC use of tutor, but had distinguished himself with a series of distinctive public
major themes from h1stonc buildings in Lyon, including a new hospital, the Hotel-Dieu (1741), the
architecture.
Commercial Exchange (174{50), and most recently the Grand
Theatre (1754), the first of the series of free-standing theatres that were
to reshape urban centres and sociability in the mid-eighteenth century.
Soufflot's project was continually revised and refined over the long 11 Soufflot
turn to antique purity and a new refinement of the Graeco-Gothic syn-
years ofconstruction, marking it as the foremost of a number of experi- Church of Ste-Genev1eve {now thesis. The columns are not only modelled on the most recent archaeo-
mental buildings where the aesthetic and structural limits of architec- Pantheon), Pans. 1757-89 logical discoveries-the baseless D oric of Paestum somewhat
1nterior
ture were tested and debated. In the design published in 1757 [ 10] the hesitatingly evoked in the crypt and the richly decorative Corinthian of
monumental free-standing temple front juxtaposed with a dome over a Balbec carefully reproduced in the nave and portico-but deployed in-
G reek-cross plan and the marriage of colonnades with a series ofdom- novatively as point supports to carry vaults reduced to their minimum
ical vaults on the interior marks this building as a milestone in there- shape and mass. Years later one ofSoufflot's collaborators, Maximilien

24 NEOCLASSICISM PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND THE NEW CHURCH OF STF.-CF.NF.VIEVE 25

 13 Sou:.;f.:.:.:
fl o:..:.t_ __ __ the capital took on new political resonance in Louis XV's determina-
Ste-Genev•eve, Pans, section tion to assert the primacy of the Gallic an church and the glory of his
through the masonry of the
pediment, as drawn by own most Christian reign, even as France saw many of her overseas
Ronde:.;.le:.;.t_ _ _ _ __ colonies, notably Canada, transferred to Great Britain by the Treaty of
As they would be hidden from Paris (1763).
vlf!W 1n the completed
building. Soufflot was able to
expenment w1th a complex An experimental design and construction site
system of 1ron tie rods to
D etermined to elevate further the dome, crowned by a statue to mark
re•nforce the carefully
calculated arcuated arid the saint's reign over her city, Soufflot raised both the profile and the
vaulted structure of h1s stakes of his daring design. For the rest of the decade he experimented
building. He took d~rect
inSpiration from the earlier
ceaselessly and relentlessly, modifYing his project even as doubts were
work of Claude Perrault in the voiced that this pursuit of perfection was leading the architect beyond
colonnade (east front) of the the limits of empirical reason. He invented machines to test the
Louvre Palace, which Soufflot
was restoring during the same
strength of materials and consulted his friendJean-Rodolphe Perronet
years he was des•gmng the (qoS- 94), the leading engineer of the day, famous for innovative
new church. bridge designs and as the founder of the first professional training for
engineers at the Ecole des Ponts-et-Chaussees in 1747. With Perronet's
pupil E .-M. Gauthey he studied different stones, and continued to ex-
amine French Gothic buildings for historical lessons. Finally a system
of iron- reinforced masonry was devised to serve as an armature for
12 Soufflot Brebion, summed up the architect's intent: 'to unite under one of the lightweight spatial and structural effects [ 13]. In short, Soufflot turned
Section of the 1764 project for most beautiful forms the purity and magnificence of Greek architecture the design process and the building site into a quasi-scientific labora-
the church of Ste-Genev1eve,
w1th the lightness and audacity of gothic construction'.8 Greek archi-
Pans
A true modem, Soufflot tecture was capable of further perfection; Gothic offered lessons to . \R\1\Tl Rl:S
continued to rE!Y/Ork and ref,ne construction but was not yet honoured itself as architecture [ 11 ]. (1m- J'rnl ~,_, k INMI" Lu -'rP~?Ilm
h1s project, seeking ever
Interpreting his brief to create a monument for the popular cult of fht P/,t.,/1/, V:t ./!vt/.fNWI J;"Hf'l(llU
greater effects of a light filled
cage of m•n•mized structure Ste Genevieve to replace the dilapidated medieval church contained
and spat•a! transparency. The within the abbey complex, Souffiot imagined his building framed on
whole was to be pierced With
large-scale wmdows wh1ch
three sides by an ample public space like an antique temple protruding
would Silhouette the free- into its forum, where several new streets might be made to converge.
standing columns. This dramatic staging in urban space was to be continued within where
the open spaciousness of the structural frame would be emphasized by
a flood of clear light from tall windows ringing the building. Laugier's
call a few years earlier for an architecture in which every element had a
structural rationale was given monumental expression. Souffiot set out
to avoid the use of pilasters on both the interior and exterior fa9ades,
using only a series of projections to articulate the transitions of volumes
in the massing of his cross-shaped plan. Construction began in 1758 on
the crypt but progressed slowly as building throughout the French cap-
ital was all but halted during the Seven Years' War. By the time Louis
xv laid the cornerstone on 6 September 1764, Soufflot had revised his
project substantially [ 12], underscoring the role of the building as an
urban-scaled reliquary for the remains of Genevieve, the fifth-century
saint whose role in the conversion of the French monarchy to
Christianity and in deflecting Attila the H un's invading forces from

26 NEOCLASSICISM A:- EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND COI\STRUCTJON SITE 27

 14 Julien David Leroy tory which confirmed his belief that even a building designed to em-
Engraved pldte II ustrabng the body the mysteries of Christian faith could be perfected by the applica-
development of the Chnslian
church type, Pans, 1764 tion of human reason.
Leroy's sma II book was The effort to perfect the very type of the Christian church building
dedicated to Mangny, whose went beyond a mastery of the laws of construction and the natural laws
reign Leroy hoped would bring
a new h1stoncal flounshmg to of architectural form; Souffiot, supported by his friend Leroy, sought
theartofarchltecture.ltsonly to master the laws of history as well. For the inauguration Leroy re-
rl ustrabon was thiS genealogy
turned to historical arguments he had developed in his publication of
of the Chnst1an church type,
culminating 'n the plans of the ancient Greek architecture and extended them to a developmental his-
two great enterpnses of Lou1s tory of the Christian church type. This was summed up in a single
XV's rehg1ous poht1cs: Ste-
Genevieve (bottom left) and
image in which Leroy arranged the floor plans, and selected sections of
the Madele1ne church (bottom Christianity's principal monuments [ 14]. With this, a historical mis-
nghtl . sion was supplied to the n.vo great enterprises launched simultaneously
by Louis xv: Ste-Genevieve and the new church of the Madeleine, in-
augurated a few months later and designed by Contant d'Ivry. Leroy
offered a veritable genealogical tree of the Christian temple, beginning
with the first adaptation of the Roman basilican plan to Christian wor-
ship and proceeding through a series of churches, each a refinement of
its ancestors. The central problem, worked out over centuries, was how
to marry the image of the Christian cross inscribed in the Latin-cross
floor plan with a grand cupola which could represent the cosmos on
earth and make the Christian temple an experience of the infiniteness
of creation in the perfect space contained within a dome. L eroy's 'fam-
ily tree' showed the progressive refinement of this form by technical ex-
perimentation as domes ever taller and more complex in section were
carried on crossings ever more reduced in material structure and ever
more conducive to open vistas within the church interior. The princi-
pal monuments of the great Christian capitals, including H agia
Sophia in Constantinople, the cathedral of Florence, St Peter's in
Rome, and St Paul's in London, which Souffl.ot had asked his col-
league Pierre Patte (1732-I8I4) to measure up, were all descendants of
the first experiment. In the seventeenth century the historic mission
passed to France, taken up in Louis x1v's church of the Invalides and
royal chapel at Versailles, a pioneer of the free-standing, colonnade-
carrying vaults. The challenge for Souffl.ot was to discern the develop-
mental law inscribed in the church type's own history and to carry it to
a new level of perfection.
The two agendas, architectural and political, met in one of the most
extravagant public pageants of the century, when Louis xv laid the cor-
nerstone before a full-scale mock-up of Souffiot's temple front on a
quickly cleared public place, now treated as an amphitheatre to be
formed by the concave fa~ades of the future faculties oflaw and theol-
ogy proposed to complete this Gallican complex. The cornerstone
f..JJ.v.,..
,,,., k w r'-
,._,M'If-..st- J.a ... .., J~~ _,,_ ·'•· • ~..,.,~~ - contained a copy of Leroy's History of the Form and the Layout which
I"',..
~, 4~'--'
l _,
.¥/Nit" f"'" J- ..;,ii.'.v ....~... f.- #Wf4 rL-___.. ___:::_._.
~-~,_,_ ... /u,J,i.-,J..,!;.nl,.,.·#'t'J.: '-'.~ ......... ~ - ~ ... ..... Christians have given their Temples .from Constantine to our own Time.

28 :-IEOCLASSICISM AN EXPERIMENTAL DESICN AND CO:-iSTRUCTJON SIT£ 29

An Enlightenment philosophy of history literally became the corner-
stone of the new building. In the same year, Winckelmann published
his I !istory ofAncient Art in both French and German, in which a sys-
tem of cultural evolution rather than individual genius was portrayed
as the motor of stylistic progression. Not surprisingly, the seeds of
modern art history and of historical philosophy in architecture were
planted at the same time.
Leroy also explained that Souffl.ot's attempt to open his building to
a maximum oflight was calculated not simply for an aesthetics oflumi-
nosit)' but to give him the raw material to instil specific experiences.
Ste-Genevieve was a great forest of columns, lifted above the ground
since the side aisles were raised several steps, creating simultaneously a
continuous plinth for the columns and a stage for the processions that
would weave behind them. Leroy extols the ways in which, from this
rational grid ofstructure, the richest effects could be achieved from the
interplay of solid form, changing light, and a processing pilgrim.
Looking through two rows of columns silhouetted against a wall
pierced with large windows, as 'the spectator [moves he] will be pre-
sented with a succession of the most varied and changing views which
result from the infinite combination of these simple objects-column
and wall'. 9 Continually shifting diagonal views open and close in this
orthogonal space, making the whole into a theatre in which light is 15 Soufflot the discipline of architecture which accorded a greater value to empiri-
manipulated and the building dramatizes the experience of nature and Ste-Genev~eve section of f.na l cal knowledge acquired through experience. Subsequent historians
human movement, to awe and provoke the mind through the sensa- prOject, c 1770 have seen here a seminal rift between architect and engineer, one that
By the tune of hts final destgn
tions of the eye and the body-to stimulate in short a contemplation of for Ste-Genevreve, Soufftot
would continue to grow through the nineteenth century, but Souffiot
the divine. Souffl.ot drew not only on the science of construction and had achteved a thorough· made no such distinction between the aesthetic and structural experi-
the newly discovered historical laws, but also on new theories of going synthests of Classical ments married in his grand bid to bring architecture into line with the
forms and Gothic structural
human perception and experience. techntques notably flying emerging Enlightenment faith in the progressive perfecting of hu-
By 1770 Souffiot had developed a remarkable system of three super- buttresses-as well as an manity. As the building rose, debate took place as much over aesthetic
exploratton of new
imposed masonry domes [ 15], creating at once a high exterior profile preferences as intellectual adherence; many, including Blonde!, ob-
ma themattcal models of
and, on an intermediary dome, a mysteriously lit surface viewed structure. jected that Soufflot's daring structure ran the risk of being more aston-
through the oculus of the innermost dome. Here was a great fresco of ishing than pleasing.
the apotheosis of Sainte Genevieve. This final effect even relied upon
Gothic buttresses, carefully hidden from view behind the parapets of The influence of Soufflot's church design
the perimeter walls, in the quest to direct structural loads efficiently. Soufflot's experiment was scarcely isolated. Not only did it continue a
But before construction had begun on the dome Soufflot's project was trajectory of exploration of a synthesis of both styles and structural
again at the heart of a controversy, this time launched by his former ally techniques pursued by several of his contemporaries, but it was also to
Patte, who published a pamphlet questioning the stability of the dome, serve as a major impetus for that quest for perfecting French architec-
the first in a number of attacks, all of which wounded Souffl.ot's pride ture which was the credo of the royal schools of architecture and of en-
but spurred him none the less to continue his experiments. The con- gineering. Elements of Souffiot's pursuit of open trabeation carrying
troversy continued long after Souffiot's death in r78o, plaguing also his cut-away vaults were echoed notably in the work of Gabriel, whose
former assistants Brebion and Rondelet, who completed the dome colonnades on the Place de la Concorde (1758/5) [19] pay homage to
around 1789. Contemporaries saw in it a stand-offbetween a new con- Perrault's Louvre and incorporate a series of pointed arched vaults be-
ception of architecture in which calculation and reason could lead to hind, the columns thereby acting as buttresses. A series of parish
architecture's ultimate perfection versus a more traditionalist view of churches begun in and around Paris after 1764, the year of the corner-

1
JO :"'EOCLASSICIS:'-1 THE 1:-IFLUENCE OF SOUFFLOT S Cll URCH DESIGN JI
stone of Ste-Genevicve, married the Graeco-Gothic analogy with a British architects in Rome: Chambers and Adam
new archaeological interest in the Early Christian basilica, promoted The British Royal Academy in London was founded only in 1768, and
by Leroy's studies. These include N.-M. Potain's design for St-Louis could not until many years later even aspire to command a national dis-
at Sr-Germain-en-Laye (1764), L.-F. Trouard's St-Symporien, course on architecture in a country where artistic culture was far less
Montreuil, near Versailles (q641o), and most prominently J.-F.-T. dependent on royal taste and patronage. Jockeying for private and royal
Chalgrin's church of St-Philippe-du-Roule (approved q68, built clients and prestige, British architects were more zealous than their
1772-84) in Paris. French architects took something of this abroad-in French counterparts in publishing luxurious volumes on antiquities
these years French expertise was in high demand throughout conti- because in a competitive market of reputations archaeological erudi-
nental Europe--notably Pierre Michel d'Ixnard in his curious reinter- tion was a credential suggesting that the most up-to-date and cos-
pretation of the Roman Pantheon in Graeco-Gothic terms for the mopolitan antiquarianism could be offered for the interiors of London
abbey church ofSt Blasien in the German Black Forest (1768-So). mansions and country houses.
The lasting influence of Souffl.ot's design, completed finally in the Robert Adam (1728-92) determined after several years of practice in
178os and 1790s by his most loyal assistant at Ste-Genevicve, Jean- his native Scotland to try his prospects in London, but before he did he
Baptiste Rondelet, was to be felt through the training of the Academic felt that an architectural Grand Tour was vital. He left for Rome in au-
Royale d'Architecrure, which since its founding under Louis XIV had tumn 1754, 'convinced that my whole conception of architecture will
seen considerable success in forging links between a corporate defini- become much more noble that I could ever have attained by staying in
tion of architectural standards and the design of the most prestigious Britain'.10 Three years in Rome was a calculated outlay shouldered by
royal and public buildings. Since the 172os-inspired by a practice al- the whole Adam clan back in Edinburgh, and Adam set himself up
ready established in the Roman Accademia di San Luca--annual grandly, as he would once again in London, so that he could bid for ad-
competitions had been a key component of the training ofyoung archi- mission to Roman society and impress future clients. Keenly aware of
tects, but after 1763 these were supplemented by monthly competitive the competition ofBritish compatriots, including William Chambers
exercises (concours d'imulation) requiring the students, frequently, to (1723-96), already in Rome when Adam arrived, and fellow Scotsman
project a major public building in a matter of hours, thus honing their Robert Mylne, who arrived shortly afterwards, Adam set about a
skills not only of rendering but of reasoning among the criteria of de- feverish study of the antiquities. He took on the French architect and
sign. As the name implies, these competitions focused attention on the specialist in views of ruins, Charles-Louis Clerisseau, as drawing mas-
emulation of great models and instituted a type of thinking in compo- ter, befriended Piranesi, and hired several young architects to help him
sition that closely parallels Leroy's understanding of architectural pro- in making moulds and drawings after antiquity on every scale from the
grammes. In 1764 Leroy was appointed as Blondel's teaching assistant, Roman baths to fragments. In 1757 he travelled to the Dalmatian coast
remaining a leading force in the Academy for the rest of the century.
Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730-85), who had won the Grand Prix in 1751, Robert Adam ( 1728-92)
also contributed much to this thinking, publishing his own projects in Trained in Scorland, where his father \Nilliam Adam was leading architect until his
the highly influential folio Works in Architecture (Paris, 1765). Among death in 1748, Robert and his brother James opened an office in London after 1758
the exemplary designs was a project for a cathedral, originally submit- which became one of the most influential and innovative practices of the cenrury.
ted to a competition of the Accademia di San Luca, which was at once Their output was prodigious, including major country houses wtth their parks (e.~.
Harewood f louse, I75Cf7I, Ostcrley Park, 176s-so, Newby Hall, q6r8o),
a purification of Bernini's St Peter's and Souffiot's Ste-Genevicve [see
castellated hou~es in Scotland (Cul~can, I77T9l), city houses on all scales from
23] in light of Laugier's ideals and a purer geometric expression in mansions (Derby House, London, 177374) to terrace house developments (Portland
planning. T his vision of correcting history is a logical corollary of Place), churches (~listley, Essex, r776 ), and town planning (Pultcnc) Bridge, Bath,
Leroy's emerging notion that St Peter's was but a link in a chain that ij69/4• Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. 179I- r8o7).
future generations must continue to forge. The competition system in Their greatest influence ''as in interiors, both for inno\·ati,·e plannin~ techniques and
delicate and t"olourful decorative vocabulary synthcsi~ed from an ec:let"tic range of
eighteenth-century academies had at its core the notion that history
C lassical sources and used to create a harmonyofsurt:lces from wall p<lintings and
and architectural progress would be linked through the repeated de- stuccoing to ceilings, carpets, and fim1ishings. Their style was widely emulated on
sign, comparison, and discussion ofsolutions to typological problems. both sides of the Atlantic. :\early '),boo drawin~.-s h) the Adam brothers were
acquired b) John Soane, who counted them among the great figures of an emerging
modern British tradition.

32 NEOCLASSICISM BRITISH ARCHITECT~ II'; ROME: CHAMBERS A!'<D ADAl\1 33

so that he might return to London with a lavish folio publication on tualization or theory of history to back up the decision, endorsed only
Diocletian's palace (Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at by the confident eye of the artist unabashedly expressing a personal
Spalatro, London, 1764), which he felt offered valuable lessons for a taste. It was this celebration of savant empiricism which was the very
new monumental approach to grand domestic planning. essence of the philosophy of the picturesque, one of the most distinc-
Although he styled himself'Bob the Roman' in letters to his brother tive of British contributions to the experimental architecture of the
and future business partner James (1730-94), and remained loyal to second half of the eighteenth century. No less than the French, Adam
Piranesi as the controversy over Greek architecture broke, Adam was brought an existing sensibility to the discovery of the antiquities of
no doctrinaire Roman. It was Chambers who would take up that cause which he was to make such personal use in his long and protean career
with ardour, especially after the Society of Dilettanti financed addi- back in Britain. But over the years the picturesque, a term Adam used
tional voyages to Greece and the Levant in the r76os. Chambers, edu- frequently himself, was to take on a more articulate intellectual clarity
cated in Blondel's school in Paris, feared that Stuart's promotion of a as he became versed in the thought of the Scottish aesthetician Lord
style of Grecian details might become the fashion, prompting English Kames. Already under the tutelage of his father, William Adam, in an
architects even further towards what he considered superficial obses- extensive Scottish country-house practice, Adam had developed a per-
sion with details and decoration rather than mastery of the great prin- sonal approach to the fashion for evocative garden 'follies', particularly
ciples ofcomposition, harmony, and balance that a study of the Roman in the Gothic style. On trips south he had discovered the pioneering
tradition could achieve. Like his teacher, Chambers sought to create a picturesque architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh, one of the first to em-
means of practice that partook of both the grandeur of the Romans and ploy medievalizing style not only for its associations and evocations,
pragmatic common sense in his Treatise on CivilArchitecture (London, but to liberate the composition of a building from the autonomous
1759), one of the rare attempts in eighteenth-century England to offer a symmetries of Classical design in favour of an adjustment to the
coherent body of architectural theory, rather than a manual, to guide changing views ofa moving spectator and to the landscape setting.
practice.
Adam was equally determined to diminish the appeal of 'Athenian' Robert Adam 's early country-house designs
Stuart's style, even managing within months of his own arrival in Within months of setting up in London, Adam had established him-
London to persuade the young patron Sir Nathaniel Curzon to prefer selfas the most promising of young talents and attracted a roster of im-
his designs for interior decoration to those already drawn up by Stuart portant clients, many sold on the Adam style to the detriment of
for Curzon's country seat at Kedleston in Derbyshire. Yet in these very established architects already at work on their estates. Edwin Lascelles
same years Adam was encouraging his brother James to extend his own of Harewood in Yorkshire, who had passed over Chambers in favour of
Roman sojourn (q6o-63) to include a trip to the Greek islands so that the local architect John Carr, proved open in turn to Adam's helpful
they could publish plates of a wide range of Greek architecture that suggestions of improvements to Carr's design. In December 1758
could beat Stuart at his own game. Adam swore allegiance to no spe- Adam offered a critique of Matthew Brettingham and James Paine's
cific style. More than anyone, he took Piranesi's call for unshackled ge- Palladian design for Curzon at Kedleston and parlayed his portfolio of
nius to heart; Piranesi in return dedicated one of his own most designs for garden structures into a commission for the 'management
inventive exercises in archaeology, the recreation of the Roman of his grounds'-providing designs for a lodge, bridge, cascade, and
Campus Martius, to Adam. When the Adam brothers announced in fishing pavilion in the guise of a hermit's hut. From the grounds Adam
the first volume of their Works in Architecture in 1773 that they had cre- mounted his successful campaign to eliminate his competition, begin-
ated something of 'a Revolution' in architecture, it was not a style of ning with 'Athenian' Stuart. By 1759 Adam was fully in charge of the
universal truth that was proclaimed, but the signature Adam style, one great house and estate, having also eliminated Paine, as he would do
of the most influential creations of eighteenth-cenrury Britain in inte- again later at Syon House, Middlesex (q6o-69), Nostell Priory,
rior design and decorative arts. The Adam brothers proudly explained Yorkshire (q6s-8o), and Alnwick Castle, Northumberland
that in handling the orders they responded to individual circumstances (c.rno-8o).
as well as to personal taste. From his earliest designs Robert Adam de- Kedleston was Adam's manifesto of a fashionable new Classicism,
vised a distinctive handling of the Ionic order, for instance, seeking 'a evident in his reworking of Brettingham and Paine's fa<;ades as well as
mean' between what he viewed as the heaviness of the Greek Ionic vol- in his adaptation of the spaces and types of antique architecture to cre-
ume and the 'other extreme' of the much smaller Roman version. We ate astonishing settings for the social rituals and personal claims of his
might speak ofa synthesis, but unlike the French there was no intellec- clients [1 6a, b]. If Adam was versed in history, it was not to unearth its

34 NEOCLASSICISM ROBERT ADAM'S J::ARLY COU'ITRY·HOUSE DE~IGNS 35

 underlying laws but to interpret, with great personal freedom, associa-
tions between the grandeur of the ancients and the quest for ascen-
dancy and legitimacy, as well as fashion, among the English
aristocracy, particularly the Whig aristocracy who cultivated the pic-
turesque for its suggestions of natural law and liberty and the antique
for its associations with their own political creed of democracy. At
Kedleston, the application of a temple portico to the north or entrance
front is still within the Palladian tradition of Lord Burlington. Adam
was at greater liberty to make changes to the south front, where he jux-
taposed the profile of a low saucer dome with a syncopated rhythm of
free-standing columns crowned by statues evocative of a Roman tri-
umphal arch. The house became at once a monument to its owner and
his family and a demonstration of Adam's conception of'movement',
'by which we mean the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with other
diversity of form, in the different parts of a building, so as to add
I'GRobert Adam greatly to the picturesque of the composition'. 11 Movement applied not
Kedleston Hall only to the path of the eye across a fac,:ade's surface but also to these-
a) South (garden) elevatiOn quence of spaces and experiences staged within. Drawing on the
The evocation of a Roman
triumphal arch brought a
lessons of the Roman baths and of Diocletian's palace-as well as
whole new range of William Kent's earlier work at H olkham H all, Norfolk-Adam cre-
associations to the country ated a central axis that leads from colonnaded hall to domed salon, a
estate of the landed
anstocracy at the same t•me creative reinterpretation of the atrium-vestibule sequence in the an-
as it served as a cient Roman house rendered here on a scale worthy of an emperor.
demonstration of those
Entirely top-lit, these central spaces provided an intense environment
staccato rhythms Adam called
'movement' 1n architecture. in which Adam calculated every detail and surface. He explored for the
b) Plan_ _ _ _ _ __ first time his favourite theme of relating ornamented treatments of the
like h•s French floors, here realized in inlaid marbles, to the rich stucco decoration of
contemporanes Peyre and De
Wailly, Adam studied the the ceilings. The design drew on an extraordinary range of antique
sequence of lobboed and sources from the grottoes of the Imperial Palace on the Roman
colonnaded spaces 1n anc1ent
Palatine Hill to the rich late-imperial motifs at Balbec and Palmyra.
Roman bath complexes as
sources for a new spatial Work was entrusted to a team of artisans with whom Adam worked
nchness in grand domestiC again and again, reminding us that Adam's signature pastel-colour
interiors. At Kedleston the
sequence of rooms bears a
palette and increasingly delicate ornamental line were in fact a corpo-
close relationship to Adam's rate creation.
study of the Iayou t of Few of Adam's great house commissions of the q6os were realized
D•ocletian's palace at Spalato.
ex novo, but it became increasingly a fundamental aspect of the pic-
turesque philosophy that a designer should enter into a dialogue with
the environment and the pre-existing, not only to find brilliant compo-
sitional solutions but even to play consciously with the overlay of
meanings and associations in such interventions. At Syon House, out-
side London, Adam was almost entirely confined to the interior of a
castellated Jacobean house [ 17a, b, c]. He was thwarted in his scheme
to fill the courtyard of the building with a great rotunda-modelled
0Adam wongs not booll
like the salon at Kedleston on the Roman Pantheon-which could
serve as the spatial focus. None the less he created in the four wings of

36 NEOCLASSICISM
ROBERT ADAM'S EARLY COUNTRY-HOUSE DESIGNS 37
17
Syon H Jse. Middlesex,
1760-69 a) View of the
entrance hall
Screen walls and stairs not
only add spatial richness but
disguise asymmetrres and
changes of level that Adam
encountered as he sought to
endow an exiSting plan W1th
grandeur and spatia l
coherence. Thtsaccepling
atlttude towards extSttng
accidents and trregulanttes
was a leature of the
picturesque attitude .n design.
b) • ante-chamber
The nch exploston of colours
here ts all the more effecttve as
part of a chromatiC sequence
lrom the cool, stone-like tones
of the entrance vestibule to the
more delicate palette of the
dtntng room. Adam's control of
detatls was always intimately
related to thl. social ntuals of
the house and the appropriate
mood or demeanour for each
of the great public rooms of
the country house.
c) Plan
- ----,--
Adam'sdreamof a grand
domed space at the centre of
tre plan to create cross-axes
and a vanety of paths tn :he
ex sling courtyard layout of the
Jacobean house was never
rea lized. None the less he was
able. by the use of screened
niches and various surface
treatments, to orchestrate a
piCturesque archttectural and
soctal Ctrcutl through the
pnnctpal pubhc rooms.

the house a picturesque circuit in which changes in floor levels and axes
were brilliantly nuanced by the usc of columnar screens and domed
half-apses and in which the sense of sequence and the character ofeach
space was carefully adjusted in the palette of both colours and materi-
als. From the almost chilly whites, blacks and greys of the entrance
hall, the eye is led, using carefully placed Roman statuary, much as
Kent had earlier done in laying out a series of sequential viewpoints in
picturesque garden design, towards the next space. The ante-room is
an explosion of rich colours and reflections, from the high gloss of the
scagliola columns to the gilt of a series of military trophies drawn from
Piranesi's illustrations. The Ionic order here, which brilliantly creates

38 NEOCLASSICISM ROBERT ADAM'S EARLY COU:.ITRY-HOUSE DESIC:>IS 39

Key of filtered views to what was emerging as the representative centre of
1. Entrance Hall
national government and of Britain's overseas empire. In the IJJOS he
created a number of London houses where his ornamental style and his
2. Ante room
development of antique spaces into picturesque itineraries achieved
3. Dmmg room ever greater sophistication, notably in the extraordinary diagonal views
4. Draw1ng room created at Derby House, 23 Grosvenor Square (I773/4i demolished
1862). But without a doubt Adam's most extraordinary interpretation
5. The Long Gallery
of his knowledge and experience of antique architecture was his daring
6. Closet speculative real-estate venture, the Adelphi, between the Strand and
7. Ante-chamber the Thames in the centre of London, where work began in 1768. Here
the first impression ofDiocletian's palace as seen from the Dalmatian
8. Bed-chamber
coastline was interpreted in a huge cryptoporticus which was also an
9. Dressing room area intended for shipping in a project that sought to balance, in both
10. Powdenng room design and financing, commercial, residential, and public functions.
Adam showed himself not only the master of interiors, but a master of
11. Writ1ng room
architectural massing in an urban landscape. Effects came more from
12. Staircase to mezzanine massing, rhythm, and 'movement', giving some sense of the extent to
13. Private dining room which the 'Grand' and the 'True', imbibed by this intense involvement
with antique culture, was now detached from any slavish reliance on
14. Ante-room
the orders. He even went so far as to omit the frieze on the Ionic order
15. Grand Sta1r
of the fafi:ade of the Royal Society of Arts, a charged gesture if ever
16. Proposed rotunda there was one, explaining that he had adjusted his composition to the
perspective view and to his own sense of refinement.
Adam's views were by no means universal. In his Treatise on Civil
D Notbuilt Architecture (1759), Chambers, who had served as tutor to the future
George III, set forth once again a flexible code for use of the orders, in-
formed by the most up-to-date French debate over their rhetorical ca-
the illusion of a symmetrical square in an irregularly dimensioned pacity to respond to the hierarchies of use and social class and the
room, is made of a combination of elements drawn from Leroy's illus- expressive demands of the unprecedented building programmes of
trations of the Erechtheion in Athens and the Roman order familiar modern society. Although the Adelphi project ended in disaster, as the
from the baths, which a follower of Adam, Charles Cameron, would Adam brothers bailed themselves out of bankruptcy, it brought an
not only record in his Description ofthe Baths ofthe Romam (1772), but urban scale to London rivalled only by Chambers' nearby Somerset
export to St Petersburg to ornament the summer palaces of Catherine H ouse (see chapter 2) and reminds us that antiquity would also play a
the Great. Evocation was the order of the day, as the house seemed to role, on both sides of the Channel, in new discourses on the city.
conflate a history as much fanciful as archaeological, for Adam asserted Ultimately it was with these unexpected challenges that the debates
a theory, much explored by subsequent historians, that the lost vestiges over imitation and invention, the ancients versus the moderns, and
of the villas the Romans built in Britain with their four corner towers universal norms versus relative circumstances would be put to the
were echoed in the form of such great Jacobean houses as Syon. Family greatest test in the final decades of the eighteenth century.
history, national history, and the history of architecture were all inter-
mingled.

The Adam style in the city: new challenges to classical norms

As early as 1759 Adam realized a small but prominent public commis-
sion, a new entrance to the Admiralty in London, defined by a screen
in Whitehall that added not only Classical demeanour but a rich play

THE ADAM STYLE IN THE CITY: NEW CHALLENGES TO CLASSICAL NORMS 4I

40 NEOCLASSICISM
 The City
Transformed,
1848-90
One of the effects ofcivilization (not to say one of the ingredients

8 in it) ... is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea of pain, is
kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in
their fuUness the benefits ofcivilization.
John Stuart Mill, 'Civilisation' (1836)

It was not simply the machines in the Palace of Industry on the

Champs-Elysees which offered a spectacle of progress in the summer
of 1855; Paris itself was being refashioned by new technologies of ma-
chinery and capital [1 18]. Under powerful gas lights, over J,ooo
worked around the clock to join the Louvre and Tuileries palaces-
separated for nearly a century by a dense and decaying quarter-into a
grand palace/museum complex centred on a public garden [119].
Napoleon 1's show street, the rue de Rivoli [63], had taken form over
decades. His nephew Napoleon m, along with his right-hand man, the
Baron Georges Haussmann (18o9- 91), named Prefect of the Seine
Departement in June I853, accelerated the process of reforming the city
explored piecemeal by earlier governments. The scale of change intro-
duced by the railway in the countryside in the r84os was now unleashed
117 Eduard Oetaille on the city, which took a place in European consciousness as never be-
Openmg of the Pans Opera fore.
House.1875 Determined to craft a showcase imperial capital, Haussmann and
Desp1te the profusiO,:;or-
omamentand nchnessof Napoleon m offered tax exemptions for 20 years to speculators in a bid
colour. Garn1er argued that the to complete in time for the r855 fair the great cross-axis that was to be
Opera's sta •rhall was complete
the backbone for remodelling the city under the banners of circulation,
only when it served as the
prop for the spectacle of a health, and security. The arcaded rue de Rivoli would be subsumed in a
whole society coming together great east- west axis bisecting Paris from the barracks at Courbevoie in
for a moment of •ntense
.nteraction 1n the m1nutes
the west to the Place de la Bastille, perennial centre of insurrection, in
precedmg the performance the east. The new Boulevard de Strasbourg (today's Boulevard de
on stage. Unfinished when the Sebastapol) would link the railway on the city's northern fringe ,-ia the
Second Emp1refell, the
build1ngwas Inaugurated
Ile de la Cite to the Porte d'Orleans on the south, clearing some of the
under the reg•me of President city's densest quarters in its projected path. These projects fell short of
MacMahon. Garn1erstandsm their deadline, but influential foreign visitors were treated to the spec-
the centre of the landing,
framed bycaryat1ds and tacle of a city refashioning itself from the I Iotel du Louvre, the largest
receiving the presidential ofa new breed ofgrand luxury hotels which embellished E urope's large
procession.
 lined the boulevards. The city that reformers dreamed of a century ear-
lier [20] now breathed an air of progress so complete that even the mu-
nicipal sewers were open for tours in specially designed wagons. The
working classes had been largely chased from the centre, and thus from
middle-class view, by escalating rents. It is estimated that over 35o,ooo
Parisians were displaced in only 18 years.
By the time the Second Empire fell in 187o, nearly every major
European capital-and many other cities which had swelled with in-
dustrialization and migrations from the countryside set in motion by
railway networks-was being '~odernized' in rivalrous emulation.
\Vhen the 1873 Universal Exhibition moved the spectacle of progress to
Vienna, the Austrian capital was ready. The transformation of the old
line offortifications into a broad annular boulevard, the Ringstrasse, of-
fered a model for other cities whose walls, effectively already breached
by trains, were now to fall to the forces of development that the railway
had unleashed. Increasing ten-fold the land area of Barcelona with a
119 Eduard Baldus planned extension of gridded blocks, Ildefonso Cerda coined the term
The Louvre and Tuileries 'urbanism' and authored the two-volume General Theory of
umted, c.1855
Urbanization (1867), the first book to offer a body of theory, rather than
Pa ris's transformation into a
showplace of urban spatial simply a checklist of tasks, for designing cities. Cerda's book had little
118 cities as railway travel transported not only raw materials, finished order was Circulated w1dely by influence outside his native Spain, however; the theory of nineteenth-
the new technology of
Plan of Haussmann's work 1n products, and labourers, but a new breed of urban consumers, the photography. At the Louvre the
century city building was encoded more in the language of contracts,
Pans. c.1853 bonds, and financial instruments that were the machines of the cen-
tourists, across unprecedented distances. The hotel, designed by phmographer Bald us was
The orig1nal map wh1ch
Alfred Armand, was a project of the Pereire brothers, bankers and land charged w1th record,ng the tury's credit revolution. Alongside these invisible inventions, France's
Napoleon presented to the
constructiOn and
new Prefect of the Se1ne upon developers, who had launched their empire in the railway boom of the photographing hundreds of
determination to remain a model of refinement-announced in the jux-
h1sappomtmentmJuneof
184os and snapped up most of the sites cleared by the state's expropria- plaster models considered for taposition of fine arts and industry at the 1855 fair-succeeded so well
1853 is Ios:, but an 1867 map the rich sculptura Idecora' <On
g1ven by the emperor to the tions along the rue de R.ivoli at preferential prices. Like 1 apoleon m that the image of the Parisian street and its architecture, both the
of this palace/museum
PrussiC!n monarch Wilham 11 they were steeped in the Saint- Simonian ideology that remapping na- complex which would grandiose buildings of state and the private architecture of the bour-
prov des the best ev1dence of
the French emperor's own
tional territory and freeing up capital would not only modernize the celebrate Napoleon Ill's geois apartment, joined the ranks of the city's luxury exports. By 1900
regime as a h1gh po1nt 1n the
involvement in redrawing country but promote the general good. the prestige of French urbanity was international, imitated perhaps
forward march of French
Pans's street network to Returning for the second Parisian 'Universal Exposition' in 1867, with even greater conviction in Bucharest or Buenos Aires, for instance,
culture.
enhance CirculatiOn of
veh1c1es. goods. and visitors would be dazzled by the great elliptical building in which than among France's western European neighbours, as the Ecole des
Ultlmatelycap1tal1n a Frcdcric Le Play had brought the bounty of the world under the con-
modernized city. trol of an ingenious organizational scheme. Radial axes were devoted
to different classes of manufactures, while the concentric rings of the
great glass and iron structure hosted displays of individual countries,
making taxonomic and national comparisons possible. The city, too,
with new radial roads connecting railway stations to the commercial
centre, gave the impression of being mastered by new standards of
order, cleanliness, efficiency, and beauty. Over 165 kilometres of new
streets-broad, straight, and furnished with pavements, drainage, gas
lighting, and newly planted trees- were punctuated by monumental
new churches, markets, and administrative buildings. With a six-fold
increase in private construction, apartment houses of unprecedented
refinement, of both exterior decorum and interior comfort, rapidly
120 Paxton Beaux-Arts welcomed an ever greater flood of foreign students into its
B~rkenhead Park near architectural ateliers.
L1verpool, 1844
Paxton 's device of separate
paths for pedestnansand Urban reform before Haussmann
carr ages whiCh never cross Like the eclectic architectural imagery of Paris's new skyline, little in
was ref1ned in Olmsted and
Vaux·s des1gn for New York's the formal repertoire of'Haussmannism' was unprecedented, beyond
Central Park a few years later. the scale and breathtaking speed of the operation. Harmoniously or-
The juxtaposition of open
dered frontages of private dwellings forming geometrically aligned
lawns for recreat1on w1th
artfully composed hortiCulture streets focused on a free-standing monument had been an ideal since
was a startmg-po1nt for the the mid-eighteenth century [ 19, 20, 61 , 63]. Parks as urban lungs and
p1cturesque style
systematized by Alphand 1n
places for the moral improvement and distraction of the working
P<lfiS for green spaces on classes from potential social unrest were lessons imbibed during Louis
every scale from the vast Napoleon's exile in London in the r84os and imported to France in the
penphera parks to the des1gn
of planted city SQuares. wake of the 1848 Revolution. What was new was the sense that an
urban whole, and with it a powerfully consistent visual form, could be
infused into a city, with overlapping and well-functioning systems of 121 F.-A. Ouquesny rather the beneficent motive of every social organism.'' Echoing Saint-
circulation, leisure, and even sanitation. In the wake of the declaration Garede I'Est, Pans..:.,-
184.,....,.,7-,5""2- Simonian understanding of the city as a veritable body, one indeed that
of 1841 that the French rail system should rapidly connect Paris to all Duquesny's stat1on design, could be cured, the statement also resounded with memories of devas-
w1th 1tscomb1nation of a
French borders, Paris was to be transformed by a network ofstreets, ra- rnasonryped1mentandan tating epidemics-r9,ooo had died in the 1848 outbreak ofcholera-and
diating from a series of rond-points, that would connect the ring of new enormous glass lunette of the barricades that had divided the city. London had shown the way,
railway stations to the centre and after r86o integrate the annexed ring announcing the round arched using street cuts such as New Oxford Street to clear slum districts while
span of the eng1neer Serinet's
of industrializing villages around the city. glass and iron shed behind, opening paths of circulation, in the wake of Edwin Chad wick's statisti-
'Government is not a necessary ulcer', the future emperor declared in was a very 1nfluent1a I cal study of the urban poor and of the Parliamentary Commission on the
•oterpretaltOn of the ra1lway
campaigning for election as President of the Republic in r848. 'It is station as a modern portal to
State of Large Towns and Populous Districts. Both reports declared a
the City. The f110numental correlation between the health, and the morals, of the working classes
scale of the lunette was and the physical environment of overcrowded speculative housing and
mtended todom1natea maJor
axial boulevard connecting the
insanitary streets. Legislation mandated minimum standards for
statiOn to the heart of the c1ty. dwellings in terms of sanitation, drainage, and ventilation, set up med-
ical inspections, and launched campaigns of building urban sewers.
Chadwick campaigned for public parks, while Engels's descriptions of
the working-class slums ofManchester, soon seconded by the social re-
alist literature of Dickens and others, made it impossible for the middle
classes to ignore living conditions in working class-districts, even if their
daily paths skirted direct confrontation with 'the other half'. In 1842laws
were passed allowing compulsory expropriation of unhealthy dwellings
in the name of the greater public good. Two years later the municipality
of Liverpool charged Paxton with laying out a spacious park in the
working-class suburb of Birkenhead. On the site of a drained swamp,
and bordered by houses, this adaptation of English picturesque gardens
to public welfare was a direct response to the faith that nature was essen-
tial to urban health and a morally uplifting agent, a worthy rival in short
to the temptations of the pub or the barricades [ 120].
In France the opening wedge for large-scale intervention in shaping
cities was expropriation laws passed to facilitate laying out the railway,
even if rail companies' desires to penetrate to the heart of the city were

URBAN REFORM BEFORE IIAUSSMANN 245

 During the short-lived Second Republic, Louis Napoleon pursued a
two- pronged policy of government-built workers' dwellings and legal
and financial incentives to jump-start luxury real estate. The Cite
Napoleon [122], intended as a prototype for public housing in each of
Paris's administrative districts, offered a startlingly original prototype in
which glass and iron skylights maximized air and light, even while iron
gates, locked each evening, betrayed an overarching concern with reduc-
ing the threat ofsocial unrest. But Like the contemporary 'Model House
for Families' in London, designed by Henry Roberts for the Society for
Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes, supported by
Prince Albert, it remained an isolated experiment. Until the twentieth
cenmry 'improved slum dwellings'-as they were called in Britain-
would be the province of paternalistic entrepreneurs such as Sir Tims
Salt at Saltaire near Bradford in Yorkshire (rSsr/6), the Krupps manu-
factory near Essen (I86J/S), or the Meunier Chocolate Company at
Noise] outside Paris (u874). Mtcr the declaration of the Empire in
December 1852 and the dismissal months later ofBergcr, Haussmann's
predecessor, for opposing debt-financed public works, Napoleon m and
his advisers put their energies fully into crafting an alliance between the
state and specially formed private land-holding and development com-
panies. On the model of the Pereire brothers' company, formed to ex-
tend the rue de Rivoli, in which the state's and financiers' interests were
mutually served by finely built ashlar masonry apartment houses, trans-
formation was soon under way in the dense cores of Lyon, Marseille,
and other provincial cities as well as Paris [ 123].
stopped short at the edge of the historic centres [ 121 ]. In the 184os the
122Gibriel Veugny
CM~ Napo~ '" Pans.
prefect Rambuteau responded to a debate over whether or not the gov-
1849-53 ernment should intervene to arrest the westward migration of Paris's 123 Adolphe Terris
(photographer)
The architect Veugny's des,gn commercial and financial centre. Since the mid-eighteenth cenmry the
for sanitary workers' dwel1ngs, Creabon of the rue lmpenale
sponsored d rectly by LOUIS quagmire of narrow streets in the central market district, Les Hallcs, in Marse1lle
Napoleon soon after h1s had been discussed as the city's most pressing need [see 18]. Now the As cities throughout Franee
elecuon 'n December 1848, were remodelled on the model
question was posed in larger political terms. Should the state or the of Haussmann·s Pans. the
was the f1rst adaptatiOn of the
utop1an sociahst,deals of a speculative market-and these were years in which economists such as works .nvolved a mass1ve
phalanstry [83J to an ex1sl1ng Jean-Baptiste Say were extolling Adam Smith's ideas of a free market as reworkingofthe terra m In
c1ty.lts use of glass and iron Marse1lle a whole hill was
skylights to create an in tenor
a democratic and namral value-determine the form and destiny of the levelled to create a broad and
street was 1nnovat1ve. Cntics of city? Rambutcau launched a policy of using street improvements as an swift link between new
the regimecla1med it put the steamship ports and the
instrument of the state's remodelling of urban space and its self-con-
workers 10 barracks. v1ewed by commerc1al centre of the c1ty.
some as potent1a lly explosive. scious channelling of private development. The street that today bears
by others as d1s1ngenuously his name was the forerunner of H aussmann's work a decade later, al-
ph,lanthroplc.
though by comparison with Second Empire boulevards it seems timid
in width and length. 1 0t only did the rue Rambuteau markedly im-
prove access to Les Halles, it was the first street in Paris to be festively
inaugurated and to sport an inscribed cornerstone-a symbolic thresh-
old of the triumph of ordered open space created by the central power
O\'er the marketplace's desire to build urban fabric to the maximum.

URBAN REFORl\1 BEFORE HAUSSM.\'1:-\ 247

 Launched under the banner of creating jobs-by the late 185os one 125
Unveiling of the Boulevard de
in five Parisians were working in the building trades-the system of
Strasbourg, 1858 (today
floating loans against future increases in the value of improved land sebastopol)
made Haussmann's works a veritable self-financing system of public Haussmann later adm•tted
that the path of the boulevard
works. In the r86os, when liberal and legitimist opponents of the
had not been determmed
regime questioned the legality of these operations and the legislature solely by the ax1s of the Gare
annulled the state's right to retain the unredeveloped portions of ex- de I'Est, wh•ch it connected to
the lie de la C1te over two m1les
propriated properties, Napoleon m's advisers replied that the 'move- away: ·lt was to tear open Old
ment of capital ... must be considered as the principal cause of the Pans, the d•stnct of the nots
progress of public wealth in Paris'. 2 But critics had begun to link mush- and barncades, by a w1de,
central thoroughfare whiCh
rooming shanty towns on the city's edge with the transformation of the would P•erce th•s almost
centre of Paris into an elegant backdrop for the very moneyed classes •mpenetrable labynnth from
who profited dramatically from urban transformation. one side to the other.'

Remodelling Paris: the markets and the Rivoli-Strasbourg

cross-axis
N apoleon m anticipated many of these criticisms. Even before the cur-
tain was raised on the first of the boulevards that made movement a part
of the urban aesthetic for the first time, the emperor demanded that thus to a national network of goods. The whole was marvelled at by
work on the central markets be given priority over all the other new contemporaries; Zola even celebrated the newly ordered spectacle of
124 Victor Baltard public buildings he hoped would leave the imprint of his regime on the abundance in his novel Le Ventre de Paris.
~ Pans 1852-55 cityscape [ 124, 125]. The 'Louvre of the People', as he called his vast ra- The Second Empire created not only a new alliance between the
The new markets hummed tionalization of Paris's food supply, was the only major state project state and the market in crafting urban space and fostering an under-
w•th eff•c•ency and order, their
gndded 1nternal streets poised completed in time for the 1855 exhibition. In place of the labyrinth of standing ofland itself as a commodity; it also negotiated a subtle hier-
as a model for the reshapmg of outdoor markets in twisting streets little changed since the Middle archy between the great monuments of the state and the residential
the c1ty beyond. The1r fra nk
Ages, Victor Baltard created a rationalized city within the city. Eight fabric. Three years after Les H alles was completed, the fac;:ades of the
industnal vocabulary prov1ded
a new model for ut1htanan rectangular pavilions ofglass and iron, maximizing ventilation and san- Boulevard de Strasbourg (now Sebastopol) were unveiled [ 125] in a
build•ng tn c1ties throughout itation, were organized around a grid ofbroad covered streets, providing ceremony celebrating the dynamism of the private market in creating a
Europe and for countless
provmcial markets m smaller
easy access for carts and pedestrians. Vaulted undercrofts were even harmonious backdrop to public monuments. The simplest legal guide-
French c1t•es. provided in hopes of a connection to the main-line railway stations and lines governed the relation of fac;:ade height to the broad new street, the
alignment of balconies, the set-back angle of the mansard roofs, and
the use of fine stone on the principal fapde [ 126]. These ensured that
the work of numerous independent builders would yield those grand
sweeping perspectives that endow even the least accomplished of the
Second E mpire's public buildings with a dramatic monumental pres-
ence. When one looks north on the Boulevard de Scbastopol, the trees
shading the pavements provide a leafy frame to the vista of the G are de
!'Est, while to the south an even more theatrical view is staged. Unable
to align the boulevard with a bridge across the Seine, H aussmann or-
dered the architect A.-W.-N Bailly, a pupil ofDuban, to shift off-cen-
tre the crowning dome of his projected Tribunal de Commerce
(1858-64) on the Ile de la Cite so that it might serve as a terminus to the
vista which greets visitors alighting at the Gare de l'Est some two miles
away. Nearly all the major monuments commissioned by the state
would be shaped by such scenographic imperatives. At the head of the

REMODELLING PARIS 249

126 du Palais which crosses the Ile de la Cite and to mask the angled depar-
Apartment house, rue de la ture of the Boulevard St-Michel, the left bank's grand new thorough-
Chausseed'Antin, c. l855 fare. The Boulevard St-Michel in turn was traced to align with a view
Apa rtment-house living had
been pioneered in Paris in the of the newly recreated fteche of the Sainte-Chapelle. The Paris of
eighteenth century, but under postcards was emerging even as photography for the first time became
the Second Empire it became inexpensive enough to compete on the souvenir market. A quip made a
the building-block of a new
urban fabric. The ground floor century earlier by Voltaire, that Paris would appear a grand city only
was let to shops, while the once its historic monuments had been excavated from haphazard
apartments were arranged to
urban fabric, now guided the work of 'liberating' monuments from
give even multiple dwellmgs
some of the allure of grand fabric as history came to reside in the monument, not the texture of the
living, from the monumentally city. With the finishing touches of Alphand's carefully calibrated sys-
scaled porte-cochere to the
contriva nee of principal rooms
tem of urban 'promenades'-a linked system of greenery on every
en suite along the street scale, from single trees planted in traffic islands where boulevards cross
fa<;:ade. to the replacement of the long straight paths of the Bois de Boulogne, a
former hunting domain, with a picturesque pleasure-ground- Paris
presented the image of the city as a scenic event, background, and des-
tination for an expanding leisured class. Alphand's publication The
Promenades of Paris (r86713) detailed the inventions that made this
possible, including special machines for transplanting mature trees,
and provided models widely followed. It was the only text that set
down something approaching a theory ofHaussmannization.

Gamier's Opera
The scenographic masterpiece ofHaussmann's Paris, the luxury quar-
ter of hotels, shops, clubs, and banks developed around the new Opera
(r86215), was completed only after the curtain had fallen on the
Second Empire at Sedan, the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian
War. Although Napoleon m would never appear in this building, cal-
culated as a backdrop to his court, Charles Gamier (r8zs-98) orches-
trated a microcosm of the values of an ascendant urban bourgeoisie
that had come into its own during his reign [ 117, 127]. In r869
Haussmann had been chased from the scene by the outcry over what
Jules Ferry labelled 'Les Comtes Fantastiques d'H aussmann', a play
both on the dual meaning of 'Comtes' in French- stories and ac-
counts-and on Offenbach's popular opera Contes d'Hoffmann (Tales of
Hoffmann). 3 Yet nothing testifies more to the durability of
Haussmann's urban system than the harmonious relations- of scale,
Boulevard de Magenta, Baltard exploited iron to maximize interior materials, and architectural language- of the urban archipelago of
space on one of the awkward polygonal building sites traced by apartment, office, and hotel blocks, and the monumentally composed
Haussmann's street network. The iron framework of the church of St- Beaux-Arts island of Gamier's Opera. It was a model of urbanity imi-
Augustin (r86o/I) is draped with a thin masonry envelope and sup- tated as much for its forms as its finances, a system ultimately eclipsed
ports a monumental dome scaled to the urban vista rather than to this only after the First World War.
parish church for the luxury quarters developing in the city's north- There is a fascinating counterpoint between the Opera and the
west. Gabriel Davioud's exuberant monumental fountain on the Place urban fabric, much of which was planned before Gamier's project was
St-Michel (r8s8-6o) was calculated to close the vista on the Boulevard selected in r86r in a particularly contested public competition. The sur-

GARNIER'S OPERA 251

250 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90
 nection to the St-Lazare station, gateway to the burgeoning western
suburbs [ 127], the opera house is composed of three independent
masses which build to a crescendo in the great pyramidal flyhouse
housing stage machinery and crowned by a figure of Apollo. This bea-
con on the skyline-Apollo is also a lightning rod!-envelops the
softer profile of the domed auditorium and the richly ornamented rec-
tangular block of the foyer and stairhall, these scaled to closer vistas.
Gamier's building is not simply a setting for opera; it is itself master-
fully staged in urban space. T he perspective is calculated so that the
stagehouse and auditorium disappear from view as one enters the
broad Place de !'Opera. The square is no longer an enclosed space in
the city, as in so many eighteenth-century squares, but the point of
convergence of a whole series of broad avenues. Even as this space sug-
gests a moment's repose, reinforced by the common cornice heights,
new vistas open up towards the rotunda entrances on the Opera's flanks
and to grand buildings beyond- banks and department stores.
G am ier presented his design as the embodiment of an empirical
and sensual approach to architecture in The Theatre, published in 1871
as construction resumed after the traumatic interlude of the
Commune. But this polemical refusal of the rationalist call for material
and structural expression of his one-time employer Viollet-le-Due was
anything but arbitrary. Gamier was adamant that iron should be ex-
ploited to create an architecture that allows free rein to the artist's
imagination and his skill in making his architecture a vehicle for a soci-
127 Charles Gamier rounding structures establish a new grand scale for the building-blocks ety's dreams and fantasies. Arguing for the supremacy of the artist's eye
New Opera, 1863-7-5- - of a city-products of the increasing power of the financial actors on and judgement, even taste, Gamier was none the less a perceptive stu-
Paris's hierarchy of a the urban land market-even while they demurely take their place in dent of human behaviour; his acuity might be envied even by practi-
background fabric of private
build1ngand prom1nent the urban tissue. The identical pilastered fas;ades of the tvvo blocks that tioners of the new social sciences of the period, who hoped to theorize
monuments of state and form the sides of the square in front of the Opera offer not even a hint only after empirical observation. Like Semper's, Gamier's notion of
public culture IS nowhere
clearer than 1n the Opera
of the different functions behind-one an office building, the other a architecture was grounded in a theory of representation, not however
Quarter where a grand sweep luxury hotel. Within its staid perimeter, the Grand H otel, another cre- in the art of making but in the observation of the basic human pleasure
of apartment l'louses prov1des ation of the Pereire-Armand team, contains several of the most luxuri- in play-acting. 'Everything that happens in the world', he maintained,
a theatncal encounter with
Garnier's rrchly decorated
ous and grandiose spaces of the Second Empire, all of them taking 'is but theatre and representation'. 4 Once again a primordial fire is pos-
opera house. The Opera rs a advantage of the spans made possible by an extensive iron frame com- tulated, but around this flame Garnier imagines social rituals taking
luxuriant ISland 1n an urban pletely hidden from view under limestone fas;ades. The opera house, by form as an individual exploits the flame to create shadow pantomimes.
arch ipelago mapped as much
by arch1tects as by the contrast, is the consummate statement of the cherished principle of the O thers gather around, first as an audience, gladly switching roles after
interactron of state buildrng Ecole des Beaux-Arts that grand public buildings should be composed a time. D espite the period's enormous progress in stage machinery,
regulatrons and a dynamrc
in both plan and elevation as lucid expressions of their component ventilation, gas lighting, and iron technology for construction-all of
real-estate market.
functions, set in a clear hierarchy. At the same time the plasticity of its which could be marvelled at by professional visitors-for Garnier the
handling, the high relief and gusto of its ornamental details, and fundamental and unchanging role of the architect was to accommo-
Garnier's introduction of rich polychromy of coloured marbles, mo- date society's pleasure in assuming roles and savouring spectacles, of
saics, and gilding, even on the exterior, represented for many a daring seeing and being seen. If the avant-garde of the early twentieth century
departure from academic decorum. vilified the Opera-Le Corbusier chief among them-it was because
Seen from the opposite end of the broad Avenue de !'Opera, cut to G amier had catered to the status quo rather than using his art as an
provide a processional approach from the Tuileries Palace and a con- opening wedge for a better world.

252 THE CI T Y TRANSFORM EO, 1848-90 GARNIER'S OPERA 253

 ple throughout of wrapping each space of assembly with circulation
space--but the reassurance of knowing the path ahead, a characteristi-
cally self-conscious psychological interpretation of the inherited logic
of the academic art of planning. .Mirrors on each of the columns not
only exploited the flicker of the gas light as the first of the dazzling ef-
fects the art of architecture could contribute to the festivities, but also,
as Gamier explained, allowed ladies to check their hair and dress one
last time in the comfort of their own social class before stepping onto
the stage of the great stairhall. There everyone would meet in the grand
spectacle of arrival and during the promenades between acts, before re-
turning to the places assigned them by ticket price.
'The auditorium seems to have been made for the staircase rather
than the staircase for the auditorium ... In this floor plan everything
seems to have been sacrificed to introductions,' Viollet-le-Duc com-
plained ofGarnier's willingness to break the rules of academic compo-
sition, which demanded that the most important place receive the
greatest opulence of decoration.5 The auditorium seemed an anticli-
max after the rich colours of an array of marbles and the layering of
space and orchestration of oblique views that make the stairhall a veri-
table kaleidoscope of effects. But Gamier was unapologetic: 'the stair-
case is the Opera, just as the Invalides is its cupola and Saint-Etienne
du l\lom its rood screen,' he replied. 6 He went on to say that the com-
position was only complete when it was filled with the splendour and
movement of the crowd in full regalia. The test was not only the eye but
also the body, for Gamier conceived a space in which architectural
forms are in dialogue with the movement and sensations of an ambient
visitor [ 117, 129a, b]. The design of the stairs themselves is characteris-
tic of this approach. The lower steps swell gently outward to commu-
nicate subliminally the grandeur of the space and of the occasion.
Midway up, the curvature is inverted as the steps now yield to the foot
and endow the arrival on the landing before the portal to the finest
seats, framed by marble caryatids, with an unhurried grace. The eigh-
128 Charles Garnier Garnier imagined the building as both a functional and ritualistic ac- teenth-century art of sublimity is here on the threshold of the modern
Pans Opera a) Sectional v1ew commodation of three classes of users [ 128a, bJ. An elaborate pavilion psychology of form. Gamier worked ceaselessly on site, testing with
b) Extenor was provided for the emperor, complete with a ramped carriage drive models of hundreds of works of sculpture, painting, and mosaic com-
Garn1er'sdebt lo V1ctor Louis's
earlier staging of arrival and
and a suite of lavish rooms for entertaining before progressing to the missioned from leading artists-the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
ascent at the Bordeaux royal box, a trajectory that never crossed the path ofother theatre-goers, and the painter Paul Baudry among them-making adjustments of
theatre •sclear tcf 261, but by although the emperor would never in fact appear there. For season colour, scale, and angle to create a harmonious synthesis of effects.
the m•d·nineteenth century
the soc1al spaces of c1rculat1011 ticket subscribers and for those holding but an evening's ticket, Gamier Underneath its dazzling surface effects the opera house made skilful
for .ntermiss10n occupy fully provided separate spatial sequences. Subscribers could alight from their use of the latest technologies of iron construction-as the campaign of
as much space as the
carriages at their own pavilion-pendant to the Imperial entrance- construction photography by Delamaet and Durandelle makes clear-
stagehouse and auditorium in
th1s palace of representabons and make their way into an opulently ornamented circular space at the but Garnier placed himself in bitter opposition to exposed iron, such as
Garn1er calculated separate heart of the building--directly below the auditorium-reserved for Viollet-le-Duc proposed for a modern French architecture [114]. 'I have
paths for each class of users.
but all converge m h1s
their social exchanges. Glimpses of the main stair hall not only provided a great fear of all definitive theories in the arts which are framed in an cx-
grandiose starrhall. a rich view through layers of space-Gamier exploited the same princi- clusivist manner,' he wrote, 'because if aesthetics becomes nothing more

254 Tll F. CITY TRANHORMED, r848-90 GARN!ER'S OPERA 255

 traced from the works of former assistants in the provinces, such as the
theatres at Reims and Montpcllier, to scaled-down adaptations from
Cracow's Slowacki Theatre of 1893 (designed by Jan Zawiejski) to the
opera at Constantin in French Algeria, and the Amazon Opera in Brazil.

The Viennese Ringstrasse

Emperor Franzjoseph's order to layout a newcityon the site of the for-
tifications ringing Vienna was carried out during decades of political
and social transformation in the Habsburg Empire [ 130]. Even before
an urban design competition focused international architectural atten-
tion on the Austrian capital in 1858, the sovereign had traced the out-
lines ofa new alliance between market and crown. Land not set aside for
new public instin1tions long needed by the city, a new opera house chief
among them, or for much needed parks was to be sold for private devel-
opment, the profits 'to establish a building fund ... [to finance] public
buildings and the transfer of such military facilities and buildings as are
still necessary'.RWith memories of the 1848 uprisings still fresh, effi-
cient troop movements were, as in Paris, one of the advantages gained
from the new broad, straight boulevards, connected to railway stations
130 (page 258)
_:_:_-:-::-:c:---
Vienna R1ngstrasse, 1860
and new barracks. Laying the cornerstone of the first monument in
a) Plan 1856, the emperor also set the stage, unwittingly, for a fierce competition
The creal-1on-o7f a-n-ew urban of values and power that was to play itself out through the style and
belt on the s le of the
fort1f cabonsand ftre zone
placement of public buildings on the Ringstrasse, as the polygonal
129 Charles Gamier than the execution ofan over-reasoned formula, it will mark the death of separat1 ng the old City centre boulevard ringing the city's historic centre was soon called. I Ieinrich
Sta1rcaseofthe Pans Opera. imagination, the spontaneous, and even of the incorrect, which arc not and the suburbs wh1ch had von Ferstel's design for a Nco-Gothic church to commemorate the em-
Obhque v1ews up from lower grown up over the eighteenth
to be disdained in human creations. '7 In later years he made himself a century created a new kind of peror's fortune in escaping a Hungarian nationalist's bullet would be
level
L1ke a choreographer, Garnier tireless campaigner for civic decorum over what he saw as a utilitarian space of contmuous raised by public subscription as, in the emperor's words, 'a monument of
threat to urban embellishment. He helped to organize the petition movement and of the
demonstrated full mastery of patriotism and devotion of the people ofAustria to the Imperial House'
the new technology to stage a integration of a broad trafftc
sequence of spaces that
against Gustave Eiffel's great iron tower for the r889 Universal artery. w1th planted parks and [ 130b]. By the time the building was completed 20 years later the
would subtly gwde theatre- Exposition and fought, unsuccessfully, to have Hector Guimard's art free-stand1ng monumental Ringstrasse had become one of the last grand landscapes of stylistic
goers from the entrance to pubhc bu1ld1ngs.
nouveau designs for cast-iron entrances to the new underground metro- eclecticism, with a Gothic city hall (187213), by Friedrich von Schmidt,
thetr seats w1th a
choreography of unfailing
politan railway replaced by stone monuments that could declare the city's bl View along the Rmgstrasse, asserting the rights of the municipality over the imperial prerogative to
ease and charm that echoed commitment to the public sphere as a place ofdignity and tradition. c.l888 plan the national capital, Theophilus Hansen's Greek Parliament
the rown codes of social A generation was trained at the Opera, importing a new taste for The apotheos1s of the (1874-83), proclaiming the arrival ofa legislative sharing of power as part
comportment. Throughout he mneteenth century's
corn posed with a rich palette colour, a sense of movement through space and tactile cues, and a quest exploration of the assoc1at1ve of the constitution awarded the middle classes in 1866, and a grandly
of colours and matenals. for spatial richness in public space into the great flourishing of Beaux- value of histoncal style 1n scaled Italian Renaissance university (1873-84) by Fcrstel, evoking asso-
grv1ng form and mean1ng to
Arts architecture in the final decades of the century. Paul Nenot, archi- ciations with the rise of secular humanist culture. Tellingly, as Car!
the new lnStltUIIOilSof the
tect of the Sorbonne (I88s-g1), and Jean- Louis Pascal, who designed the modern natiOn-state. the Schorske has noted, these three landmarks of the ascendant liberal
masterful medical school at Bordeaux (1876-88), were among Garnier's Ringstrasse JUxtaposed a bourgeoisie were laid out on precisely the land still held in reserve in the
Grecian Parliament. northern
assistants. The vast majority of theatres designed in the second half of Goth 1c Town Hall, a great
first years of planning to serve as a military parade-ground.9
the nineteenth century owe both their vigorous, even neo-Baroque, Rena1ssance palazzo for the The Ringstrasse quickly emerged as the favoured setting for the new
sense ofform as well as their urban prominence in no small degree to the umvers1ty, and a lwtf'l-towered fluid relations between the rising strata of the bourgeoisie and the old
Goth1c church erected to
example of Haussmann and Garnier's collaboration. In addition to commemorate a fa1led
aristocracy who mingled at the Opera (Siccardsburg and van der Ni.ill,
Garnier's own work on the festive Casino at Monte Carlo (r87819), the assass1na1ton attempt on I861-69), the first building completed on the Ring, and the Burgthcater
building's exceptionally far-flung and long-lasting influence could be Emperor ~"ranz Joseph 1. (Semper, 1874-88), and who enjoyed in both the wealth and the prestige

256 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, l848-go THE VIENNESE RJNGSTRASSE 257

131 Semper generated by the construction of the grand blocks of apartments that
Project for the Museums rose to share in the aura of the new cultural symbols. Significantly, the
d1stnct. Voenna.l 873
In th1s monumental projeCt for
two theatres were the only buildings whose forms locked into the spatial
expanding the palace and flow of the boulevard itself, each designed with great loggias for prome-
creating new museums of art nading that took in at the same time privileged views of the urban spec-
and natural history, Semper
wasabletog1ve form toh1s tacle on the boulevard. The other public buildings were set as
theory that monumental free-standing monuments in the chain of parks developed at the new
fa<;ades should be the
quarter's broadest points, coming into view sequentially and individually
theatrical backdrop to the
ntuals ana mst1tutnns of as one travelled along the s6-metre (r84 ft)-wide boulevard, prototypes
urban life. The Rena1ssance of the monument set in greenery which was to be repeated worldwide in
for him COincided w1th the
emergence of free City-states
coming decades as museums, opera houses, and administration build-
and bourgeo1scultureand he ings were connected with projects for tree-lined boulevards. One of the
proposed 1t be further most innovative features of the road design was the provision of service
developed for modern t1mes.
roads for moving goods separately from the broad central roadway, left
open for faster horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses.
By the time of the Universal Exposition in 1873 the Ringstrasse was
a marvel of civic engineering, along with new quays along the D anube
and a state-of-the art sewage network. On display at the Exposition
were colossal renderings ofa project of neo-impcrial splendour that ran
counter to the new model of urbanism emerging on the Ring [ 131 ].

THE Vlt:N!'£SE RI'\CSTRASSE l 59

 Dissatisfied with the results of a limited competition for a museum 132
complex to be placed just outside the old gate to the palace, Franz Apartment houses on the
Re1chsratstrasse, Vienna.
Joseph had called Semper from Zurich in r869. Together with a young c.l875
Viennese architect, Karl von Hasenauer, Semper drew up plans for a The mon-um-e-nta---=-fa-t;ades of
the great ·rental palaces· gave
grand 'Culture Forum', in which a vast extension to the palace would
distmct1on to the apartment
be linked across the Ringstrasse by triumphal arches to the great house blocks that fi lled the
domed blocks of pendant museums for art and natural history. plots opened up by the
R1ngstrassedevelopment. At
Whereas in the 184os, in projects for joining museum and opera house once dwell1ng and Investment
in Dresden, Semper had proposed to blur the distinction between for the m1dd le class. who
court and city, in Vienna his forum was a revival of more traditional enjoyed expanded political
representation 1n a
urban space defined by the great walls of buildings in counterpoint to COI'SI•tuhona monarchy and
the dynamic flow of the Ringstrasse. Even in its partially realized form, expand,ngeconomiC cower,
the verdant square between Vienna's museums offers a bounded space plans were 1nvanably
contrived to place recept1on
of stasis, and refocuses attention on the imperial Hofburg and on the rooms on the fat;ade of the
great statue of Maria Theresa surrounded by major figures of the build1ng. maKing Ringstrasse
vistas a quantJfiable
Austrian Enlightenment, a celebration of the partnership offered by
commodity.
the crown to the liberal bourgeoisie in the constitution of r866.
Although Franz Joseph had set up a City Expansion Commission be divorced, for the large-scale block responded not only to a specula-
to oversee the building of the Ringstrasse, the discussion of the ideal tive logic but allowed for the grandeur of imagery and scale that en-
form of a modern city sparked by the competition continued for sured maximum prestige and hence rental revenue. Plans invariably
decades, fostering the growth of the belief in German-speaking placed reception rooms along the fac;:ade, making the Ringstrasse's vis-
Europe after r87o that city planning was a domain of professional tas themselves a quantifiable commodity.
knowledge. As the first building plots were being offered for sale, a
controversy erupted over both the form of dwellings and the respective The Ensanche of Barcelona
roles of marketplace and the state. Opposing the spread of the apart- By the time Barcelona's walls were razed in r8s8, not only had the
ment house, already established as the form of middle-class dwelling Mediterranean port achieved the greatest population density of any
in the dense inner city of Vienna, constrained for decades by its fortifi- European city, but the urban crisis had inspired Ildefonso Cerda
cations, architect Heinrich von Ferstel and art historian Rudolf von (r8IS/6), a trained architect and engineer, to devote his life and per-
Eitelberger argued that the state should mandate the development of sonal fortune to formulating a general theory of'urbanization', which
newly opened land with single-family houses set in gardens. 'The sale he declared a new science. At first glance Cerda's plan to decant the
of these building sites should be undertaken with the interests of the enormous concentration of population, wealth, and commerce con-
community in mind ... The objective should be public welfare, and not tained within Barcelona's defensive walls across the surrounding terri-
short-term gains,' they argued. 10 Ironically enough they took their in- tory seems but an elaboration of those gridded cities the Spanish
spiration from speculative villa suburbs that had ringed London with empire had used to colonize the New World since the sixteenth cen-
the tentacular spread of the railway and the progressive separation of tury [ 133]. But for Cerda the plan, with its superimposition of a great
places of dwelling and work in middle-class life. \.Vhilc Ferstel suc- diagonal cross-axis establishing a regional scale for a repeatable pattern
ceeded in creating a 'cottage association' in r872 and developed 300 of city blocks with distinctive chamfered corners, embodied his notion
homes in Vienna's Wahring suburb, the market for luxury apartment that it was possible to channel the forces of nineteenth-century specu-
houses prevailed, transforming much of the Ringstrasse into a dense lative development towards a higher communitarian ideal, one indeed
quarter of majestically scaled middle-class apartment blocks [ 132]. formed in conscious critique of the H aussmannian model.
These 'rental palaces' (Mietspaliiste) borrowed the imagery of Vienna's Arriving in Nimes in June of r844 Ccrda, employed as a civil engi-
Renaissance and Baroque palaces for fac,:ade details and such interior neer to improve Spain's roads, was overwhelmed by the sight of the
accoutrements as grand staircases even while floor plans tested archi- railway and the realization of the impact it was having on city and
tects' ingenuity in devising schemes to maximize the number of countryside. It was as if in 'those long trains ... whole errant popula-
dwellings and profit on each site. Aesthetics and economics could not tions had suddenly moved house'. 11 Cerda dated his determination to

260 THE CITY TRANSFORMF.O, r848-90 THE ENSAN CHE OF BARCELONA 261
 might be conceived as a process to last several generations. Cerda did
not enter the competition, but his lobbying in Madrid in favour of
ideas he had long been formulating for his native Catalonia as a cri-
tique of what he viewed as the entrenched conservatism of local prop-
erty-owners found support. His plan was adopted in r86o.
On lengthy visits to Paris between r856 and r858 Cerda examined
Haussmann's work with the same statistical completeness he had al-
ready applied to diagnosing Barcelona's ills, measuring street and pave-
ment widths, noting distances between benches, trees, and even urinals.
But although he was to be an advocate of an ideally dimensioned grid of
spaces and services in the modern city, he insisted that a plan divorced of
a social calculus could never serve more than the interests of a narrow
class. 'No-one had even considered the question of providing comfort-
able accommodation for the great number of families who would be
mercilessly evicted,' he complained of Haussmann's work, advocating
in turn that planning a city must comprise both streets and houses.13
'The family house is an elementary city,' he noted, insisting that neither
could be abandoned to the uncontrolled speculative market. 14 Cerda
imagined the city as an organism whose dynamic growth must be mas-
tered rather than as an ideal form to be composed. Speaking of the city
as Viollet-le-Due was in those same years speaking of buildings, Cerda
133 lldefonso Cerda study cities to that moment, declaring that 'the application of steam as introduced his General Theory of Urbanization with a promise: 'more
Ensanche of Barcelona, plan
a locomotive force marked for humanity the end of one era and the be- than the materiality, I want to speak of the organism, the life, I should
as adopted in 1860
Cerda conceived of all streets ginning of another'. He returned to Spain with the writings ofLeonce say, which animates the material city's material parts'. 15 Like any organ-
as part of an endless and Jean Reynaud, former Saint-Simonians who postulated that the ism, a city is a constant interchange between principles of movement
communication system,
railway would promote the abolition of artificial boundaries, restruc- and stasis, terms that came both from his training in mechanical engi-
insisting that all be straight
and equally wide. Individual turing spatial relations in terms of networks of time and exchanges of neering and his readings in French positivist theory. Discussing the
residential quarters were to be goods, and of the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who great square that Barcelona's city administration thought should serve
the same throughout the city,
not only to accommodate all
had pronounced private property to be 'theft' when it was held by those as the link between the old town and the newly laid-out quarters, Cerda
soc1al classes but to forge a who did not work. 12 proposed instead a grand railway station linking all lines at a single
model of a city of infi nite Barcelona's port was booming with the arrival of the first commer- nodal point-a critique of the circle of individual stations that ringed
expandability.
cial steam-ships even as the city's population had more than doubled in Paris, London, and Vienna by the r86os. Reflecting Jean Reynaud's idea
a century within its walls. Cerda joined his voice to growing popular of the city as a nodal point on a territorial grid, formulated in the Saint-
demand for demolishing the fortifications, whose only defenders by Simonian Encyclopidie Nouvelle as early as the r84os, the modern city
mid-centurywere property-owners enjoying escalating rents on scarce would be a place of interchange in a world dissolved of borders and
urban land. The social uprisings ofJuly r854 provided the final impetus walls. At counterpoint to the streets as transportation corridors was the
to convince the city fathers, who ordered the walls to be demolished careful design of districts. \Vith all blocks chamfered, the intersections
and agreed to organize a competition to solicit plans for city expansion of streets in Barcelona's plans provide places of assembly which Cerda
and beautification. Launched in r858, but a few months after the an- imagined as the community squares of the modern large city. In some
nouncement of Vienna's Ringstrasse competition, the Barcelona plan places several blocks could be combined to form large public gardens-
attracted little attention outside Spain. But from the first the pro- a correction of the grid introduced in these same years in the creation of
gramme, as well as the proposed projects, was far more radical in re- Central Park in New York-but Cerda's proposal was even more radical
sponding to the request that the city be allowed to expand to its natural in that he proposed that each block be built on only two sides and then
topographical boundaries. Rather than designing an ideal urban quar- only with rows of houses no more than 24 metres (99ft) deep; all the re-
ter of monuments, contestants were invited to consider how planning maining area was to be developed as gardens, parks, or open space. The

THE £ NSANCHE OF BARCELONA 263

two rows could either be parallel or set at right angles, varied to create
different patterns, introduce hierarchies of neighbourhoods, and create
localized focal points around schools, churches, and market halls. In
some cases, up to eight blocks might be combined to accommodate in-
dustry; but Cerda condoned no radical separation of zones of work and
living, as in the industrializing cities he had visited in France and
England. While the formal aspects ofCerda's plan served as models for
other Spanish city 'expansions', including those of Madrid, Bilbao, and
San Sebastian, even in Barcelona the market ultimately triumphed.
City blocks were densely filled with apartment houses, mansions, and
even blocks of flats for workers, all of which are closer to large-scale
blocks oflate nineteenth-century Berlin or Vienna than the controlled
garden metropolis envisioned by Cerda. By the time of his death in r876
Cerda was at work on a synthesis of his earlier theories of'urbanization'
and 'ruralization' into a global theory of national spatial planning, aver-
itable colonization of Spain's interior. This work served as a point of de-
parture for the Madrid architect Arturo Soria y Mata's r884 prototype of
a linear city in which the new technologies of tram and train travel orga-
nized urban space in a model freed of traditional images ofcity form.
134 church, market, and post office, ample house plots were laid out on
The rise of suburbs Panoram1c v1ew of the curvilinear streets and set in picturesque landscape developed to create
proJected suburb at Le the illusion of living in ample countryside even while discreet hedges
In 1858 a 436-hectare site on the main route west from Paris to St-
Vesmet, 1858
Germain was developed as a planned suburb, a veritable haven of do- Mmutes from St· Lazare
and garden walls denoted property lines. The first houses borrowed
mestic life from which most forms of trade and industry were banned. railway stat1on and all the their imagery and forms from the French rural vernacular, especially
modern urban funcbons the half-timbered Norman cottage destined for a long career in sub-
In emulation of the suburbs proliferating on the railway lines out of
around the Opera, the
London, Le Vesinet [ 134] was a verdant nodal point on Paris's emerg- nineteenth·century suburb urbs and seaside resorts, notably at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast, de-
ing suburban rail network. Around a small gridded 'village centre' with was the d1alect1cal opposite of veloped by the Pereire brothers in conjunction with new railway lines.
the rat1onally planned city, set
1n a contnved nature w•uch
The ideal of the suburb, pioneered by John Nash and others on the
even obscured the boundanes edge ofLondon [62] around 182o, had its first heyday in direct connec-
The English suburb
of mdMdual propert1es, tion with the dispersal and specialization of space made possible by
The separation of middle -class residence from the commercial urban core was already although here houses sought
a diversity in style and
new modes of transport. 'Villa quarters' rose on the fringes of nearly
characteristic ofLondon's western and northern growth in the eighteenth ccnmry,
but it was only in the nineteenth century that the suburb became associated with the personality QUite distinct from every European city, in particular in Germany where walls were pro-
theanonym,tyofthe Pansian gressively dismantled, as the setting of home life was increasingly dis-
ae:;rhetic of free-standing buildings. J. C. Loudon became the mo~t vociferou,
apartment house.
advocate of individual 'villas' of the type pioneered by Nash in the Park Villages [ 62] tinguished from sectors of the city given over to the burgeoning world
and Loudon's own 'semi-detached' \ilia at PorchesterTerrace, Bayswater (r82J-s), of the office, of places ofentertainment, and ofdepartment stores- lo-
publishing numerous articles and handbooks, notably his widely used The Suhurban
cated on omnibus routes and near main-line stations- which drew
Gardmuand Villa Companion (18)6- 38). This appeared at the same time as the first
railway lines out ofcentral London began transforming patterns of the daily
customers from the city and beyond. New architectural types and the
commute to work. Loudon belie\·ed that suburban life could accommodate both new distribution of urban activities went hand in hand in the nine-
responsible! citizenship and the crafting of a private univer;e ~et in the illusion of open teenth century.
nature. As Dyos and Reed er noted, 'the middle-class suburb was an ecological
marvel.lt gave access to the cheapest land ... to those having most security of Critics and the planned city
employment and leisure to afford the time ;lnd money spent travelling; it oftered an
City modernization was codified as a 'science' in influential manuals by
arena for the manipulation of social distinctions ... to those most adept at turning
them into shapes on the ground .. .'('Slums and Suburbs', in 11.). IP.·os and l\ tichael Reinhard Baumeister (City Expansion in its Technical, Legal and
\Volff(cds), The Victt»ian City: ]mager and Rel.llities, vol. 2, London,·I973• p. 369). Economic Aspects, r876) and JosefSti.ibben (City Planning, 189o), whose
winning project in the r88o competition to replan Cologne's former

C RIT I CS A ND THE PLANNED CITY 265

135 Camillo Sitte in cartoons and spoofs on the monotony ofHaussmann's works in the
Pro t llor the transformatoo
r86os, found support in two influential works published at the height
of the Vohve Church Plaza.
Voenna, from Ctty Building of nineteenth-century urban expansion, Camillo Sitte's City Planning
Accordmg to Arttsfic According to Artistic Principles (Vienna, 1889) and Charles Buls's The
Prmclpfes088 ..:.9
:.:l_ _ __
Aesthetic ofCities (Brussels, r893). Both the Viennese architect and the
To Integrate free-standong
monuments 1nto the c1ty labnc former mayor of Brussels-a city that had undergone a radical
and to reform the vast open 'Haussmannization' in the r86os and 187os-attacked the systematic
spaces of the Ringstrasse.
Sottedrew up concrete
application of rational formulas in defence of the distinct artistic
proposals such as th1s one to wholeness of individual cities as the work of time and generations.
flank the Vot•vkirche by lower Sittc studied medieval and Baroque town plans throughout Europe,
bu•ldmgs filling out to the
street line and creating a
not to reform them but to learn their secrets, chief among them the
sequence of outdoor spaces. idea of bounded and enclosed spaces as both aesthetically and psycho-
mcluding a great cloistered logically more pleasing, and the appreciation of varied and unexpected
arcade.
viewpoints as adding interest and a sense of distinctive place. \Vhile he
admitted that it was impossible to recreate in modern times what had
grown up over time, he insisted none the less that public buildings and
diverse functions should be integrated into the fabric of the town.
Sitte and Buls alike attacked architectural restoration in that spirit
of Viollet-le-Duc which 'liberated' historical monuments from sur-
rounding fabric, arguing that the fabric was as important to both mem-
ory and modern well- being as to individual monuments. While Sitte's
visual categories arc reminiscent of the English picturesque tradition,
with its emphasis on the empirical, the originality of his work-and its
resonance with contemporary concerns-was its preoccupation with
the psychological resonance of urban space. Responding to theories
formulated by the emerging field of psychology that the modern city
posed dangers to the nervous state and mental health of its inhabitants,
Sitte prescribed learning from historical cities, just as artists learned
from nature, to make the new art of city building a therapeutic and
restorative practice. For his native Vienna he even drew up proposals
for restoring some of the qualities of close-knit, traditional urban fab-
ric, scale, and thus sense of community to the Ringstrasse by adding
additional building blocks to fill the voids and reconnect the monu-
ments to the town and the individual [ 135]. Like Morris, Ruskin, and
Wcbb in architecture, Sitte opened the debates on tradition and inno-
vation, on art and community, and on the role of art in the psychic
fortifications led to a career in planning urban expansions in cities from sense of the individual in society which were to be prominent themes
Naples to \-Yarsaw and Helsinki. Sti.ibbcn praised Paris, noting that of the art nouveau and the early modern movements.
'The city lies ... transparent before us ... it is just as easy to find one's
way about as is a clearly designed house. This gives us a feeling ofsecu-
rity and pleasantness ... something that the visitor in an unsystemati-
cally designed city will always miss. ' 16 By then critics had launched an
attack on the planned city, holding it responsible for that national and
personal degeneration which became a common complaint of thefin de
siecle. Scepticism of geometric order and regularity, already expressed

CRITICS A :-.ID THE PLA:-YNEO CITY 267

 The Crisis of
Historicism, r87o-93
The cult of the monument vs the cultivation of the interior

9 An impassioned critique of historicist culture was voiced as early as

1874 by Friedrich Nietzsche, who diagnosed 'a malignant historical fer-
vour' as one of the crippling symptoms of a modern culture burdened
by archaeological erudition and faith in the laws of historical progres-
sion. In his seminal The Use andAbuse ofHistory, the German philoso-
pher described the loss ofindividual and communal subjectivity in the
modern urban landscape of historical art and architecture in which
man 'is turned into a restless, dilettante spectator'. 1 History had so per-
meated culture that it had overwhelmed 'the other spiritual powers, art
and religion as the one sovereign'.2 Nietzsche's prognosis was largely
ignored in the renewed mandate to official art and architecture in the
187os and 188os to endow new political realities with the aura of tradi-
tion and permanence in the wake of political upheavals and wars which
redrew the map of Europe after 1870. The unification of Italy and of
Germany (which emerged as an industrial power to challenge the dual-
ism of Britain and France), the strategic dispersal of power within the
sprawling Habsburg Empire, and the struggles in France to erect the
Third Republic on the debris of the Second Empire, would all enlist
the existing arsenal of historicist architecture to fashion new bids for
legitimacy.
Yet alongside an official architectural culture of escalating historical
136 Victor Horta rhetoric, a series of new experiments was launched in domestic and
Tassel House, Brussel-s.- -
stairhall, 1892 commercial architecture which drew on new theories of art's potential
The daring celebration of iron to craft a realm for individual realization, a place even for an escape
in a domestic mterior was from those very masks of culture which N ietzsche decried as the char-
accompanied by a new
flowing conception of interior acter of public life in the century where historical consciousness had
space. Space.light, emptied individuals of subjectivity. The fervent experiments of avant-
decoration, and bod1ly garde culture of the r89os- experiments often described as the
movement through the house
merged as rarely before. The seedbed of modernism-had been anticipated in many ways in the
'whiplash' line, a s•gnature or 187os and r88os. Indeed, most of the salient features of the art nouveau
Belgian art nouveau. 1nfused
had already been explored in the 1880s, from the wide-scale use of
everyth•ng from wall pa•nt•ng
to the design or light fixtures coloured glass and floriated decorative treatment of wrought and cast
and structural•ron, as Horta iron, notably in Paul Sedille's Printemps department store in Paris
took up the idea o' a total
mterior pioneered 1n England
(r88r), to the quest for a harmony of interior effects which broke down
by Moms and hiS followers. the distinctions between architecture and the decorative arts in the
work of the English Arts and Crafts movement. What was new in the
r89os was a Europe-wide cult ofyouthful innovation, variously labelled
'Jugendstil' (youth style) in Germanic Central Europe, 'art nouveau'
(new art) in France and Belgium, and 'Liberty' in Italy, where it evoked
as much the political notion as an admiration for the Liberty store in
London, a shrine of the Arts and Crafts movement and William
Morris's philosophy which was to be a building-block of that anti-aca-
demicism and anti-historicism which grounded the art nouveau as a
protest movement against the status quo.

Urban landmarks and the rhetoric of legitimacy

Europe's capitals were more than ever the arena of conflicting values
played out in the built landscape of cities. In France, the political
stand-off between secular and religious parties which characterized
the return to parliamentary rule under the Third Republic after r872
was emblazoned by r889 in the Parisian skyline. The slowly rising
domes of architect Paul Abadie's Sacre-Coeur atop Montmartre, a
glistening white monument ofexpiation by which the Catholic church
hoped to induce atonement for the materialist decades of the Second
Empire, competed with the towering Joo-metre (984ft)-high pinnacle
of iron erected with breathtaking rapidity by the engineer/builder
Gustave Eiffcl-the centrepiece of the Universal Exposition of 1889,
the centenary of the French Revolution[ 137a]. The tower was decried
by many as a crude work of engineering that broke the harmonious
equilibrium of Haussmann's urbanism-notably by Charles Gamier,
who spearheaded the campaign of artists and intellectuals against the
'useless and monstrous' tower 'unwanted even by commercial
America'3-even as its state sponsors and the republican left celebrated
it as a veritable crucifix of the secular faith in technological progress.
Some even characterized it as the first embodiment of a new art, an 'art
nouvcau', echoing Eiffel's own claims that he had allowed forms with-
out precedent to emerge from the demands and possibilities of con-
struction in undisguised iron. Unlike the Sacre-Coeur, which skilfully
combined a multitude of stylistic references to the past to imply that a
medieval matrix of styles could sponsor a modern style, the great iron
tower was freed from all references to the past, its forms determined
uniquely by lines of tension, compression, and wind resistance.
No less a monument to the capacity of positive engineering science
to rival history was the great hall of machines which stood next to the
tower on the 1889 fairground. Ferdinand Dutert and Victor
Contamin's Galerie des Machines offered with the broadest span yet
achieved in iron construction not only proof positive of the
Exposition Universelle's mandate to celebrate a century of progress
since the French Revolution, but a sublime spatial experience that ri-
valled the Crystal Palace of r8sr. Yet while historians of modernism

270 THE CRISIS Or HISTORICISM, 1870-93 URBAX LAI\0:'-tARKS AND TilE RHETORIC or LEGITIMACY 2'J1
 138 Felix Narjoux
Rue de TangerSd o
1875-77
Even before state law requ1red
un1versal secular educatiOn,
Viollet-le-Duc's followers had
defined a new vocabulary for
the school· buildong
programme of the city of Pans.
Narjoux, whose publications
of municipal bUIIdmgs
ensured an International
mfluence for French utiltlanan
architecture. created thts
dramahc sect100al
perspect1ve to celebrate the
maxtm,zabon of hght and
vent,lahon 1n bUIIdmgs clad
w1th th1n, sheer poers of
polychromatiC bnck.
punctuated With wondows, and
opened by ample structural
tron. who quickly made the ubiquitous schoolhouse with its clear conjugation
of materials and constmction into a triumphant expression of the secular
democratic spirit of the industrial age, a fulfilment in a sense of the pro-
gramme announced a half-century earlier by Sainr-Simonianism (see
chapter 6)[ 138].
137 long ago extracted these buildings from their context as landmarks in France was not alone: programmes of school construction an-
V1ew of the Expos1t1on the rise of a modern architecture freed from nostalgia and incorporat- nounced the triumph of secular and rational municipal administration
Un1verselle. 1889. Pans
a) prev1ous page, the E. ffel
ing the daring of engineering developments, the r88os and r89os were in London, where by 1895 over 400 schools had been built in response
Tower bl The Pala1s des Beaux much more affected by architectural innovations in a host of other to the Elementary Education Act of r87o, and Berlin, where the ratio-
Arts buildings on the fairground. Jules FormigC's Palace of the Fine Arts, nal style ofSchinkel's Bauakademie was adapted to provide elementary
Centrepiece of the 1889
World's Fa1r, E1ffel's tower's
which combined a metallic frame with a colourful mixture of materi- and secondary schools as well as a host ofother municipal utilities with
ongmal function to als, including polychrome brick and glazed terracotta, offered a hy- the stamp of rationality that heralded a new conception ofgovernment
commemorate the centenary brid palette which combined industrial progress with the Semperian as a progressive force. In London E. R. Robson, architect to the School
of the French Revolubon soon
gave way to a host of other
notion that architectural meaning could derive from a modern 'dress- Board, adopted both the flexible stylistic language of the 'Qyeen
messages, from celebrabng ing' of structure and was more suggestive for integration in a host of Anne', pioneered in house architecture by Richard Norman Shaw and
French econormc and W. E. Nesfield, and its progressive associations. A major component
new urban building demands [ 137b].
technical achievement to
advert1S1ng E1ffel's own of what came, by the end of the century, to be called the 'free style' on
company. r orm1ge's Palace, Schools and the ideal of secular municipal administration account ofits relaxed attitude towards historical precedent and its cele-
w1lh 1ts nch polychromabc
In less festive interpretations this vocabulary of mixed materials served as bration of individual sensibility, the Qyeen Anne style had been asso-
effects ach1eved by exhibiting
a palette of other industnal the architectural grammar of the school-building program me launched ciated with progressive social attitudes first in Shaw's designs of the
matenals, most notably by the Third Republic, and even exercised a great influence on American garden suburb of Bedford Park (r8n- 8o) and then through its use for
ceramic tile. was to have a
more 1mmed1ate 1mpact on
architects who were just then devising the first 'curtain walls' for enclos- Cambridge's first women's college, Newnham College by Basil
publiC build1ng. ing the iron framework of commercial office buildings. While this Champneys (r874-r9ro).
colourful palette would influence a new generation of commercial struc-
tures in France, its most visible application came in the hundreds of Public architecture in newer nations
schools which, by 1900, had transformed the daily landscape ofcities and Ideological battles between architecture as the instrument of a national
villages across France. The passage in r882 of the law requiring universal consensus and a vision of the state as rational provider gave new po-
secular education (the Loi Ferry, after the minister Jules Ferry) gave a tency to historical architectural styles in shaping the national agenda,
new focus to the rationalist programme of Viollet-le-Duc's disciples, particularly in politically 'young' countries where stylistic choices not

272 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM, 1870-93 PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE IN NEWER NATIONS 273
 cityscapc could rival Joseph Poelaert's Palace of Justice (r866-8J),
which reorganized the cityscape of Brussels and responded to the ef-
forts of Belgian politicians to foster a workable unity of Flemish and
Walloon populations. Poelaert gave a brilliant personal and emotive
interpretation of the official preference for a monumental Classicism, a
style which deftly sidestepped the ongoing debates over national style,
with partisans of Gothic and Renaissance pasts, in this young country
where historical narrative was too easily partisan. In newly united
Germany, Ludwig Hoffmann and Paul Dybwad's National Law
Courts in Leipzig (r88j95) took up the monumental Classicism intro-
duced with Paul Wallot's Berlin Reichstag as a style that could likewise
transcend local traditions to forge a national cosmopolitan imagery. A
contrary approach was pursued in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum
(r876- 8s), whose architect P. J. H. Cuypers, one of the most rigorous
and inventive of Viollet-le-Duc's disciples, turned to the D utch
Renaissance for a stylistic matrix, evoking a period when national
greatness and identity had first come to fruition. T his refusal of both
the Gothic and Classical Revivals in the first monumental building to
rise in Amsterdam for centuries offered a monumental secular imagery
that sidestepped troubling rifts between Protestants and Catholics.
Style in this period, when regional identities were in rising tension
139 Giuseppe Sacconi only involved an editorial choice about the past, but offered a bid to with centralizing efforts, could be as much an instrument ofdiplomacy
Rl"me, Monument to V1ctor suppress rival presents. After the capital of the new Italian state was and consensus-building, such enterprises suggested, as of overt politi-
Emmanue111, 1884
moved from Florence-its role as capital from r865 to r87o coincided cal dominance.
The ventable embod1ment ot
bombastiC state with extensive works of urban renewal-to Rome, the Italian architec-
representat,on, Sacconl's tural profession's energies were focused on crafting monumental im- Stylistic rhetoric and the rise of advertising
monument to the young Italian
state's concern to assert the ages of the secular state to rival traditional Christian symbols. At the By the end of the century it was not only national consensus that was
ant1quityof 1tscu1ture would same time architects responded to the imperative to help craft a na- being pursued through stylistic signs and historical associations in ar-
rapidly beCome the target of tional identity from a mosaic of regional cultures; many adopted the chitecture. Business and industry also began to assert claims through
avant-garde crit1ques. For Le
Corbus,er th1s modern notion that all ofltaly shared a heritage of'Romanitil or Romanness, the manipulation ofarchitectural imagery, exploiting the urban promi-
Classic1sm- 'the horrors of giving monumental Neoclassicism a new impulse. Great publicity sur- nence of buildings such as factories and warehouses with a nascent
Rome' he called t 1n h1s
serrunal TowardsaNew
rounded the open competitions for a new Palace ofJustice (r883) to be sense of advertising. It is no coincidence that the r88os and r8gos, asso-
Archl/ectureol 1923--wasa raised on a marshy site on the banks of the Tiber and a national monu- ciated with the heyday ofgraphic invention in posters and handbills-
parody of the origtnal. ment to Victor Emmanuel (r88z and r884) [ 139] on the edge of the one of the media that ensured the rapid dissemination of the fashion
Forum, both intended as secular rallying points for a new Italian con- for the art nouveau after I893-also gave birth to some of the most
sensus and as elements on the Roman skyline which could rival the memorable uses of stylistic imaging for commercial architecture.
prominence of the dome of St Peter's. Alternative views which looked Orientalizing architecture, with its rich colours and exotic forms of
to the medieval past were offered by architects such as Carnillo Boito in Moorish and Arab derivation, had long been exploited to connote lux-
Lombardy and the Vcncto and Alfredo d'Andrade in P iedmont, but ury, notably in the famous engine-house for the waterworks at
their styles soon took on the aura of regionalist rebuttals to the central- Sanssouci in Potsdam (1841-42) by Schinkel's pupil Ludwig Persius,
ization of state culture and imagery in the Roman capital. where the smokestack is treated as a monumental minaret set at the
The closing decades of the century bore witness to numerous ambi- cusp between the Classical town and the picturesque gardens of the
tious projects for central courts and national museums, aimed at pro- royal domain. By the late nineteenth century even factories, long gov-
viding highly visible institutions to focus national identity around the erned by a pragmatic utilitarianism, adopted historicist strategies for
secular activities of justice and culture. Few efforts to secularize the the economic potential of image recognition and salesmanship.

274 TliE CRISIS OF HISTORICIS:\1, 1870- 93 STYLISTIC RHETORIC A:-10 THE RISE OF AOVERTISI:--IG 275
 The domestic realm and the refuge of the psyche
One of the most salient shifts in the entire discussion of architecture in
the decades after x87o was a growing interest in exploring the psychol-
ogy of form through the new disciplines of experimental neurological
medicine and psychology. While late eighteenth-century sensational-
ist ideas (see chapter 3) were common currency by the early nineteenth
century, the relation of form to states of mind was given a whole new
emphasis and scientific grounding at the end of the century in two
widely diverging areas. One was the rise of medical research on the
nervous system, which allowed an increasingly direct correlation be-
tween external stimuli and the physical and emotional reactions of
human subjects; the other was the emergence of empathy, and by x89o
Gestalt psychology, as a pursuit of aesthetic theory, particularly in
Germany where a scientific basis for aesthetic judgement became a
predominant concern of philosophical inquiry. Something of the re-
newal of interest in Baroque architecture in the x88os and r89os, partic-
ularly in southern Germany and Austria, must be attributed to the
explorations by Robert Vischer, H einrich Wolffl.in, and others of the
emotive powers of Baroque movement and space in a series of widely
read works. Perhaps most suggestive of all was the theory that space
rather than style was the fundamental link between the formal quali-
ties of architecture and the overall character of any given moment in
civilization. Whereas eighteenth-century sensationalism rapidly came
to serve as a support for exploring the persuasive power of public build-
14 0 Examples are particularly to be found in breweries, distilleries, and to- ings and for the discourse on reformative institutions, the emergence
Templeton's Carpet Factory 1n bacco factories, where buildings served as advertising not only in the of modern physiological study coincided with a whole new attention to
Glasgow. 1889_ 9_2_ __
By the 1890s the exot1c landscape but as images on product labels. In France vineyards built the realm of the private interior as a necessary retreat from the pres-
languages of an expanded Revivalist chateaux to figure on bottle labels and give the aura of pedi- sures of public life in the overlapping social, religious, and cultural dis-
knowledge of world gree and antiquity as architecture became a medium of vintage! But courses of the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
archltecturewasco-opted by
the burgeonmg art of few buildings are more spectacular in this regard than Templeton's In France the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot at the
advert1s1ng. Here references Carpet Factory in Glasgow (1889-92) with its exuberant colour and Salpetriere H ospital in the x88os gave broad currency to concepts of in-
to the near east and
jagged skyline and reminiscences of the Doge's Palace in Venice and dividual and even national nervous health. The theory that the sensory
Byzant1um are used to
connote the luxury of modern the newly discovered polychromy of Assyrian and Persian architecture overstimulation of the modern metropolis was a factor in the widely dis-
carpets. [ 140] . Here the wall as carpet was not so much a homage to Semper's cussed fears of national degeneration, particularly acute in France in the
theory of the textile origins of architectural ornament as an advertise- wake of the Paris Commune and the defeat at the hands of the
ment for the oriental origins of luxurious carpets! By the end of the Prussians, was countered by proposals that the private interior should-
century historical reference, on the wane in the world of official repre- as D eborah Silverman has argued in an innovative study of the origins
sentation, was enjoying a renaissance in commercial architecture, of art nouveau design-'take on a new role as a soothing anaesthetizer
where the period's exploration of the capacity of architecture to affect of the citizen's overwrought nerves'.• Reinforced by the discourses on
human behaviour was now to be exploited more for profit than for so- individuality as a means of achieving personal freedom in a modern so-
cial engineering or national identity. Belatedly architecture joined the ciety, the conception of the domestic interior was transformed in but a
arsenal of the burgeoning art of advertising, which quickly exploited few years from a place primarily to assert status or historical ancestry-
even the newest findings of the young field of visual psychology to fine- of the type pioneered in the eighteenth century by Walpolc-to a place
tune its message and appeal. expressing personal feeling and fulfilment. In parallel, architectural his-
tory itself began to shift its focus from the history of church design as

276 THE CRISIS OF ITlSTORTCTSM, I870- 93 THE DOMESTIC REALM ANOTHE REFUCE OF THE PSYCHE 277
the paradigm for stylistic development to a fascination with the house Art nouveau
as the most accurate mirror of the social development of specific cul- Art nouvcau's heyday ia>tcd a scant 10 years, between I Iona's Tassel House of1:!92 in
tures. Tinged with colonial discourses, this would inform the displays of Bmssc:l" and the Turin \Vorld's Fair of1902, in which the excesses of art nouvcau
ethnographic v1llages and panoramas of the history of human habita- ornament were broadly criticized. But it proved immensely popular and repre~ented
tion that were among the most popular displays at the World's Fairs at the first architectural style without historical precedent.
Earlier architects had turned to nature for inspiration, nntahly Ruskin's tollowc:rs, but
the end of the century, notably the street of nations designed by Garnier
art nouveau architects took interest in the organic world ofform as a principle of both
in 1889 in the shadow of the very Eiffel Tower he reviled. By the 189os ~tnK tu raJ form and spatial dcsip1. Viollet-le- D uc w ·"another major >Ourcc of
developments in house design, in particular the innovations both tech- in~piration, and accounts for many architect~' celebration of revealed constru<"tion in
nical and stylistic in the country and city houses of Shaw, \Vebb, exposed ironwork. The whiplash line was a :;upcrficial si~.\11 ofstyle that could be
Lethaby, and other 'free-style' practitioners in Britain, were to be sin- traced from poster and book design in me I88os to the dccomtion off Iona's house, in
gled out as the forerunners of a critique of reigning historicism. For the early r8gos to furniture design, but more important was a shared ser of principles
and attitudes which infused even work whose rectilinear and abstract geometric
I lermann Muthesius, an outspoken critic of official architectural cul- exploration seem at odds with the organic. Charles Rennie l\lackintosh was a pioneer
ture in Germany, writing in The English llouse (1904), the English house in this regard, soon followed by the \'ie1mese SeccsslOOists. 1\lackintosh's Glasgow
offered not only a model for reforming the interiors and lifestyles of in- Sd10ol ofAn (1896) ,,.,\> tinp;ed Hill wim element> of the Scottish baronial tradition,
dividual Germans, but a veritable paradigm of a new way of thinking e\idenc:e too that art nouveau often merged \\ith elemenr.. of regionalism and
about architecture that could break the pattern of historicist thought nationa I Romanticism. In Hungary and Poland, tor instance, art nouveau quickly
incorporated elemento of a revival of interest in folkcultun:.
Nietzsche had so potently criticized in The Use andAbuse ofHistory. The
stage for the modern movement's preoccupation with the domestic
realm as the tnte field for exploring the nature of modern consciousness,
as well as its profound distrust of public architecture as an increasingly Art nouveau was a short-lived fashion, its forms exhausted within a
hollow exercise in rhetoric, was set. Its first great flourish came in the decade by their commercial overexposure and aesthetic reaction. Yet
interiors of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona, of Victor H orta and Henri this vibrant movement forms a bridge to the twentieth century, when
van de Vel de in Brussels, the early work of Hector Guimard in Paris, the legacy of nineteenth-century design theory mingles with the cul-
and by the end of the century the first designs of]osefMaria Olbrich in ture of the avant-garde desire to celebrate a break with tradition. By the
Vienna and of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. late 18gos the domestic interior had emerged paradoxically enough as a
Paradoxically it was the great publicity given to the freedom from prime focus of public debate on the relationship benveen environment
convention in private interiors such as Horta's Tassel I louse of 18g2, and modern consciousness, and it was here that art nouveau was to
often seen as the veritable threshold of the art nouveau, that allowed make its greatest challenges to convention.
architecture seen only by invited guests to be celebrated almost
overnight as the makings of the first modern art with true freedom
from historical reference. Behind an extraordinarily discreet fayade,
H orta exploited the technology of glass and iron construction he had
learned from the great greenhouse structures built for the royal family
at Laaken in the r88os by his master, Alphonse Balat, to create an inte-
rior of unprecedented spatial fluidity. Here was a celebration of the
fact that even within metropolitan conventions the individual psyche
could be unleashed in the world of the interior. The famous staircase
[136] revealed both H orta's willingness to free the imagination and to
pursue the cues offered by such mentors as Viollet-le-Due about the
search for a new organic style. The tensile strength of iron is for the
first time given an iconographical expression in Horta's combination of
cast and wrought iron to express the fluidity of iron; and the whiplash
line points to the numerous calls for architects to study the underlying
generative principles of nature so that an architecture might be found
that is at once freed from historic precedent and tied to a larger order.

2]8 THE CRISIS OF IIISTORICISM, 1870-93 THE DOMESTIC REALM A:-10 TilE REFUGE OF THE PSYC.IIE 279