JACQUES ANDROUET DU CERCEAU (d. 1614) JEAN DU CERCEAU (?)
SALOMON DE BROSSE (1571–1626)
JACQUES LE MERCIER (1585–1654)
(1591–1669)
JEAN AUBERT (d. 1741)
ARMAND-CLAUDE MOLLET (1670–1742)
JEAN COURTONNE (1671–1739)
NICOLAS DULIN (1675–1751)
JEAN-SYLVAIN CARTAUD (1675–1758)
PIERRE-ALEXIS DELAMAIR (1676–1745)
JUSTE-AURÈLE MEISSONNIER (1695–1750)
CONTANT D’IVRY (1698–1777)
ANGE-JACQUES GABRIEL (1698–1782)
JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BLONDEL (1705–1774)
FRANÇOIS FRANQUE (1710–1792)
JACQUES-GERMAIN SOUFFLOT (1713–1780)
RICHARD MIQUE (1728–1794)
ETIENNE-LOUIS BOULLÉE (1728–1799)
MARIE-JOSEPH PEYRE (1730–1788)
CHARLES DE WAILLY (1730–1798)
VICTOR LOUIS (1731–1795)
PIERRE COTTARD d. 1701)
PIERRE BULLET (1639–1716)
JULES HARDOUIN MANSART (1646–1708)
ROBERT DE COTTE (1656–1735)
PIERRE CAILLETEAU (LASSURANCE) (1660–1724)
JEAN-FRANÇOIS BLONDEL (1663–1756)
GERMAIN BOFFRAND (1667–1754)
CLAUDE-NICOLAS LEDOUX (1736–1806)
ALEXANDRE-THÉODORE BRONGNIART (1739–1813)
JACQUES CELLERIER (1742–1814)
FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH BÉLANGER (1744–1818)
54. T imeline chart of kings, architects, squares, hôtels , and publications, 1500–1800. Hôtels in italics no longer exist.
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Versailles and Blenheim:
Total Design
Versailles and Blenheim represent the apex of Baroque culture and planning in France and Britain. The château and the palace are enormous buildings that appear small only in the context of their elaborately developed and controlled landscapes. Both buildings open to the surroundings on one side, and, conversely, both have a central focus that is the result of a compositional buildup beginning implicitly, if not literally, at the horizon. At Blenheim the center is occupied by the hall; at Versailles, by the bedroom of Louis XIV. It had taken approximately two and a half centuries to go from the fractured city-states of the early Renaissance to the axis-mundi passing through the king’s bedroom at Versailles. The concentration of power that was achieved during that time was ominous; and as the symbol of Louis XIV and the seventeenth century, Versailles still represents the epitome of the tyranny of public life, of total architectural and social control. As Hamlin explains:
One might choose the “Levée due Roi” in Versailles as perhaps the most expressive . . . of Baroque scenes. In that square monumental room, crowded behind the white-and-gold balustrade which cuts it in half, stand the favored few of the vast court, to watch in silence as the king gets up from his gorgeous satin-hung bed, aided by the correct court officers, with a ritual which controlled almost every motion.4
The pageantry that characterized Baroque culture was supported, at least through the seventeenth century, by French architectural theory. Architects favored rectangular rooms, direct relationship of facade to plan, freestanding buildings, and above all, symmetry. (The unrelenting rigor of this system apparently prompted Mme de Maintenon, during the last years of Louis XIV, to complain that unless something changed she would
Versailles and Blenheim
even be obliged to “die in symmetry.”5) The plans of both Versailles and Blenheim are generally gridded, and the rooms, arranged in enfilade, are contained and unified. “What the French liked,” Emil Kaufmann observes, “was . . . to express the ideas of both unification and differentiation distinctly, but without any exaggeration. Any abruptness was to be softened; the harsh exigencies of the Baroque system were to be reconciled to the refined national taste.”6
72. Versailles, site plan of the château. Engraving by Le Pautre.
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73. Versailles, plan
56 Public Spaces: The Baroque Hôtel
117. Place Dauphine, plan, 1610
118. Place Dauphine. Engraving showing the decoration for the entry of Louis XIV into the Place Dauphine, August 26, 1660.
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The Urban Squares of Henri IV
The last of Henri IV’s town planning projects was the semicircular Place de France,10 which was designed in 1610 but never finished. In this project political and symbolic content was the overriding consideration because at that time France was still not a completely unified nation, and some areas were particularly independent. The intention was therefore to create a symbol of national unity as well as of civic pride—France as a unified entity of individual elements—and the Place was designed accordingly. It was to be located on vacant land behind Le Temple and adjacent to the wall of Paris between the Porte St.-Antoine and the Porte du Temple. A new gate, the Porte de France, was to open into a large, semicircular space defined by seven public buildings separated by streets radiating from the place. Each was to bear the name of a major French province: Picardy, Dauphine, Provence, Languedoc, Guienne, Poitou, Bretagne, and Bourgogne. Beyond the public buildings was an outer ring of streets named for Brie, Bourbonnais, Lyonnais, Beaune, Auvergne, Limousin, and Périgord; and finally the extensions of the radial streets were named for Saintonge, La Marche, Touraine, La Perche, Angoulême, Berri, Orléans, Beaujolais, and Anjou. Only a small part of the scheme was carried out, but this concept of a monumental gateway to the city is known from the engraving by Claude Chastillon. And if, today, the idea of the Place de France seems a bit “quaint” or “naive,” we need only consider the power of Jefferson’s lawn at the University of Virginia—the idea for which now seems equally “quaint”—in order to feel renewed enthusiasm for the Place de France.
119. Place de France. Engraving by Chastillon.
120. Site of the Place de France. From the Turgot plan. The Place de France was planned to go directly behind Le Temple. Rue Charlot and rue de Boucherat (formerly rue-neuve St.-Louis, now rue de Turenne) are the only executed elements of the Place de France scheme.
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Display and Retreat: The Rococo Hôtel
211. Faubourg St.-Germain. From the Jaillot plan, 1778.
Another hôtel by the same architect is far more famous and is indicative of impending change, both on the inside and the outside. The Hôtel d’Amelot was built by Boffrand in 1712 as a speculative venture,16 and it appears at first glance to be a more flamboyant version of the Hôtel d’Argenson. The site is regular, the building is nominally symmetrical, and the plan evokes the Hôtels Beauvais and Lambert. In contrast to the Hôtel d’Argenson, however, the central axis of the plan is blocked, forcing a counterclockwise progression through the sequence of figural rooms. This idea
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was to become virtually standard in the hôtels of the last half of the century, as was the variety and specificity of the rooms. But the oval court, upon which the rest of the organization depends and which in plan is so convincing, is, unfortunately, less coherent in three dimensions. The mass of the building is fractured around the space and even ceases at the two service courts; the definition is continued only by a screen wall. A lower mass completes the composition at the street and forms the entry gate. Thus, although the building mass extends from party wall to party wall, and although in plan the space of the oval court appears to control the organization, in reality the plastic qualities of the solids are dominant. Here, figural solid competes with figural void.
266. Detail from the Jaillot plan showing the undeveloped area beyond the boulevards
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The Neoclassical Hôtel
Just as the Place Royale initiated the cycle of Baroque hôtels that were built in the eastern, Marais, section of Paris and the Place Louis-le-Grand initiated the cycle of Rococo hôtels built in the western faubourgs of St.Honoré and St.-Germain, the Place Louis XV was the catalyst for the cycle of Neoclassical hôtels built north of the grands boulevards on previously undeveloped land. The boulevards had long marked the limits of the city; building was forbidden beyond them. When their landscaping matured in the 1750s, the boulevards became fashionable for the promenade à la mode; and when private building resumed at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763), the areas north of the boulevards began to develop rapidly. The model for the Neoclassical hôtels in this area, and the most influential building of the period, was Gabriel’s Petit Trianon, built at Versailles between 1762 and 1768 for Madame de Pompadour.
The Petit Trianon was indeed a pivotal building, for it completed the tendency of the Rococo hôtels toward freestanding pavilions. The Baroque hôtel type, organized asymmetrically around a platonic void, was now turned inside out so that a regularized, freestanding, platonic solid concealed an asymmetrical plan. Each facade of the Petit Trianon is slightly different, but all are symmetrical and three have a central emphasis reminiscent of Palladian villas. The plan, however, is the antithesis of Palladio: only on the west side do the rooms match the facade, with the dining room centered behind the implied portico; and the major central room in a Palladian plan is here replaced by a central solid containing the bathroom and other services. Thus the French talent for creating, and then exploiting, a rift between public image and private accommodation, between inside and outside, endured even when the spatial system was inverted.
For years the shock of abstraction, assisted by carefully orchestrated polemics, obscured the conventional underpinnings of modernism and accentuated its invention. Now, however, it is evident that although modernism as a style was revolutionary, as a set of principles it was evolutionary. In architecture, for example, we can see that the utilitarian tradition represented by Hannes Meyer and the humanist tradition represented by Le Corbusier1 share a common ancestry deeply rooted in the eighteenth century. In addition, Le Corbusier was also the eager beneficiary of an obvious formal legacy, despite his efforts to conceal it. This classical legacy, quite clearly French, included the typical French schism between theory and practice, between public architecture and domestic architecture. Le Corbusier thus appears as a sort of caricature of the eighteenth-century French trad ition—a latter-day Ledoux, but with global impact.
Like his eighteenth-century counterparts, Le Corbusier was involved with ideal or utopian urbanism, with domestic architecture, and with illustrated architectural books, both treatises and handbooks. An important difference between him and his French predecessors, however, was sequence or timing. Ledoux outlined his agenda for the future near the end of his life and published it just before his death; Le Corbusier established his agenda rather early and then spent the rest of his life trying to explore and implement it. The earlier French sequence of urban intervention–series of hôtels –publication was reversed: for Le Corbusier it was publication–series of houses–urban intervention. For him, theory preceded practice.
Shortly after the end of World War I, most of Le Corbusier’s architectural and urban theories were in place. His dom-ino (1914) and citrohan (1920) prototypes for housing had been developed, and the first issue of the journal L’Esprit nouveau 2 appeared (October 1920). In 1922 his project for a ville contemporaine de 3 millions d’habitants was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne; in 1923 the first edition of Vers une architecture was published; and in 1925 the Plan voisin, an application of the
350. Ville contemporaine, plan, Le Corbusier, 1922 351. Dom-ino frame, Le Corbusier, 1914
principles of the ville contemporaine to the city of Paris, and the project for the ville contemporaine itself were both exhibited in the rotunda attached to the Pavillon de l’Esprit nouveau (the immeubles-villas version of the dom-ino frame) at the Paris Exposition des arts décoratifs. Thus within five years, Le Corbusier outlined his architectural and urban theories, illustrated their application, and began to publicize them.
The first volume of his Oeuvre complète, covering the period 1910–29, illustrates a series of houses—some built, some projects—in which he explored the principles of the “New Architecture.” In addition, there were several large projects, including the Palace of the League of Nations (1927–28), the Mundaneum (1929), and the project for the Centrosoyuz in Moscow (1929).
By the early 1930s, Le Corbusier’s war against the traditional street and everything that went with it was clear in both theory and practice. His project for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931) and the Salvation Army building in Paris (1932) both exhibit an anticonventional attitude toward the street; and the principles of modern town planning that were adopted at the fourth CIAM conference in Athens (1933) on the “rational city”
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212 Le Corbusier and the City of Modern Architecture
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382. A nvers, urban plan, Le Corbusier, 1933
383.“Le Plan de Paris 37,” Ilot N. 6, Le Corbusier, 1936
384. Paris, Palais de L’Institut. Sketch by Le Corbusier.
385. Paris, Place Vendôme. Sketch by Le Corbusier.
I n proposal after proposal, from the plan voisin for Paris to St. Dié and Berlin, Le Corbusier the “city planner” demonstrated the application of the ville radieuse. In each case, the application was more or less pure with minimal adjustment for local circumstance, and in each case the message was clear: the new system would have to totally replace the old; there was little or no place for the old in the new, for this was the city of the future—new, pure, and untainted. The relentless rationalism of his new town proposal for Anvers in 1933 only exaggerates the violence of his plan for Ilot no. 6 in Paris in 1937.
That Le Corbusier was aware of the historical system he was proposing to destroy, as well as of the source of the destruction, is confirmed in Concerning Town Planning (1946):
The Palais de l’Institut in Paris (formerly Collège Mazarin). This act of will in the heart of the tangle of streets and contorted areas of Paris created a special mode of architectural treatment. Many masterpieces of invention have been provoked by the restraints of the site.
This is to become the special whim of the Parisian school: the practice (perhaps, the love) of sterile problems.
A gainst all sense, the habit of aligning buildings on the streets is to persist, creating the present practices: alignment on the streets and enclosed courts and light wells, two forms entirely contrary to human well-being, and to which the “Athens Charter” has opposed the principle of architectural development from within to without.
Place Vendôme, Paris (previously [Place] Louis-le-Grand). Here the streams of architecture and town-planning have joined to form a lake of repose in the bristling town compressed within its military walls; an architectural fashion owing much to the interior decorator and the scenic
designer flowered in the salons and anterooms. Salons to the glory of kings and princes. A fashion that soon flourished in the provinces, abroad, wherever courts were held and courtiers dwelt. Paris, Invalides and Ecole Militaire. Buildings on unrestricted sites developed on other lines. The spirit of order and commandment is the same, the same verve and grandeur, but in place of successive ante-chambers walling out the slums (hollows), palaces rise, growing from within to without, composing blocks of dwellings, naves and domes, surrounded by space, and now offering to the eye volumes under the sun (solids). Hollows or solids are both lawful forms when they occur as expressions of a way of life.16
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409. Paris, apartment house, plan, Henri Sauvage, 1928
4 10. Paris, apartment house in rue Guynemer, ground and typical floor plans, Michel Roux-Spitz, 1925
411. Paris (Neuilly), apartment house in boulevard d’Inkermann, ground and typical floor plans, Michel Roux-Spitz, 1929–31
412. Paris, apartment house in boulevard du Montparnasse, typical floor plan and plan of seventhfloor studio, Michel Roux-Spitz, 1930–31
413. Paris, apartment house in quai d’Orsay, typical plan and plans of a hôtel particulier on the sixth and seventh floors, Michel Roux-Spitz, 1930–31
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493. T he SDUK Plan (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), 1845
