Oxford History of Art European Architecture 1750-1890 Barry Bergdoll O X fO R D UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0 x2 6 d p Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dares Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the U K and in certain other countries © Barry Bergdoll 2000 First published 2000 by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the proper permission in writing o f Oxford University Press. 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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data is b n 0-19-284222-6 10 987654321 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Bergdoll, Barrry European architecture 1750-1890/ Barry Bergdoll. (Oxford history of art) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture—Europe 2. Neoclassicism (Architecture)—Europe. 3. Architecture, Modern—19th century-Europe. 1. Title. 11 Series. NA956 .B47 2000 724’.i9-dc2i 00-036747 ISBN 0-19-284222-6 Picture research by Elisabeth Agate Design byjohn Saunders Printed in Hong Kong on acid-free paper by C & C Offset Printing Co. Ltd. £OCC^ (Ui > ^ (■ Contents Introduction i PARTI PROGRESS, ENLIGHTENMENT, EXPERIMENT 7 Chapter 1 Neoclassicism: Science, Archaeology, and the Doctrine of Progress 9 Chapter 2 What is Enlightenment? The City and the Public, 1 7 5 0 -8 9 43 Chapter 3 Experimental Architecture: Landscape Gardens and Reform Institutions 73 PART II REVOLUTIONS 103 Chapter 4 Revolutionary Architecture 105 PARTIN NATIONALISM, HISTORICISM,TECHNOLOGY r37 Chapter 5 Nationalism and Stylistic Debates in Architecture i39 Chapter 6 Historicism and New Building Types 173 Chapter 7 New Technology and Architectural Form, 1851-90 207 Chapter 8 The City Transformed, 1 8 4 8 -9 0 241 Chapter 9 The Crisis of Historicism, 1870-93 269 Notes 280 Timeline 286 Glossary 293 Further Reading 297 Picture Credits 308 Index 3i5 Experimental Architecture: Landscape Gardens and Reform Institutions We must allow our minds to travel in time and space, as did many of the period’s artists, intellectuals, and landed aristocracy. Not simply on the Grand Tour to the classical ground o f the Roman campagna or the newly discovered ancient Pompeii, but also to the new worlds that pa­ trons and architects sought to create back at home. These were often filled with souvenirs of antiquity, in the verdant settings of the land­ scape garden and the imaginary futures of utopian blueprints. Even as cities boasted new public settings for collective rituals in the 1760s and” r/yos, architects were exploring the interaction between individual consciousness and architecture in places removed from the constraints of governments and social traditions. Since the Renaissance, gardens and utopias allowed a freedom from conventions, fostered a sense of a return to origins, and hosted startlingly original architectural design. In the late eighteenth century they were exploited as territory for the practical exploration of Enlightenment theories not only of nature, but more fundamentally of human nature. Aesthetics emerged as a distinct philosophical concern, although as it did it began to chart some of the territory that would later be claimed by psychology. Some of the most aesthetically daring experiments would be essayed in the controlled environment of the garden, where the period’s taste for exoticism, from Chinese pagodas and Turkish tents to primitive cabins, would find free expression. Not only did these encourage playful reflection on the place of western culture in larger historical and geographic spectra, but ar­ chitecture’s own nature could be tested in these ‘laboratories’ and the findings rapidly introduced into the realm of civic architecture, striving to keep pace with the accelerating pace of political, economic, and so­ cial change. The new philosophy of sensation Few philosophical movements had such a sustained impact on archi­ tecture as did the epistemology of sensation in the wake of John I^ocke’s epoch-making Essay Concerning HumanJ.-J-nde.r.standina.(-[()?iQ). Sensationalism, or the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from ex­ perience through sensations, was to have profound effects on.aesthetic theox-V-because-it-sought-to_elucidate the_direct and immediate rela- tionship between physical objects and mental states. J-t-op.ened new horizons for thinking about how architecture conveyed meaning and how tnose meanings coma in turn pe manipulated. Having reiected~Fhe~ existence oQnnate-ide.as, Locke posited that all thoughts derive from experiences, some direct and repetitiv.e.-0.thers_de.v.eloped over time through chains of associated ideas building one upon another. Cumulative experiences gradually constructed the human subject and its all-important capacity of memory. Locke’s ideas were expanded and revised by Shaftesbury, Addison, and other British empiricist philoso­ phers, and served as the basis for the writings of Condorcet and Helvetius in France, Charles Bonnet in Switzerland, and many others, so that by the mid-eighteenth century sensationalism sought to rival in the human realm the precision that Newton had brought to experi­ mental exploration of the natural realm. Even as Laugier was seeking a natural model for structural expression, the philosophy of sensation opened the way for exploring the hypothesis that architectural mean­ ing had a basis in nature and was embodied in a range of forms and configurations prior to, even outside of, the canon of the inherited clas­ sical language of architecture. It became possible even to argue that ar­ chitecture had an ecjual, if not superior..effect.on emotions, thoughts, and ultimately morals- to the representational arts of literature, paint- ing, and sculpture. After 1750 the spectrum of aesthetic categories was broadened and the precision with which aesthetic responses could be gauged and in turn exploited was honed as never before. The sublime, first posited as a literary category, and the picturesque, pioneered in garden design, came to rival the beautiful as architectural values. Grounded in explorations of the interactions between the natural realm and inner mental states, it is hardly surprising that sensationalist ideas rapidly entered the complex nexus of ideas that sustained the fashion for the irregular or ‘natural’ garden in the eighteenth century. A- whole new appreciation of the relationship of architecture to its envi- ronment was fostered, one in which buildings were composedln har­ mony rather than in counterpoint to their landscape setting, „c-haHeng-ing thereby a priori canons of symmetry, frontality, and unity. In England, for instance, neo-medieval houses, from Vanbrugh’s house at Greenwich (1718-21) to Payne Knight’s Downton Castle in Herefordshire (1772-78), were valued for their asymmetrical integra­ tion with their natural settings as well as the contrived sense that this irregularity was the result o f changes over time rather than a unitary design conceit. Along with the capacity o f architecture to evoke histor­ ical or literary associations, the very mechanisms by which forms and compositional arrangements affected the emotions, and thus.the-soul. £>f viewers were tesTeti~in~iandscape-design: The picturesque and the landscape garden The English natural landscape movement underwent significant change in the decades between 1719, when the poet Alexander Pope and the architect John Vanbrugh both employed ‘picturesque’ to advo­ cate creating landscapes like paintings, thus substituting pictorial for architectural criteria in laying out gardens, and 1794, when Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Uvedale Price (1747-1829) argued that the ‘picturesque’ was a distinct category of aesthetic experience with its own formal laws and emotive effects. From the first, this embracing of simple or ‘natural’ nature over the highly formal and geometric ‘artifice’ of the gardens of Versailles—which enjoyed Europe-wide prestige for over a century—was celebrated as a distinctly English invention, one which paralleled, endorsed even, the quest for a society founded on natural law, liberty, and tolerance. Shaftesbury, who, like Locke before him, argued that given freedom man would seek the good, used the wilderness as a symbol of nature in its primitive state and thus a symbol of-universal order. The landscape garden became something of a utopia, a place where humanity’s own natural morality rejoined the natural realm of which it was a part. Indeed, many of the most spectac­ ular English picturesque gardens were created by and for members of the W hig aristocracy, whose political position was built on this philo­ sophical foundation. Most notable of these were the famous gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire where, for the leading W hig Sir Richard Temple, Charles Bridgeman’s grand formal layout of 1719-20 was de­ liberately eroded over the 1730s and 1740s as a programme of garden pavilions and natural tableaux was created by William Kent and, later, James Gibbs.