European Architecture 1750-1890
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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. Within the U K, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, byway o f trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. 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 What is Enlightenment? The City and the Public, 1750-89 The conviction that monumental public buildings and urban spaces might sponsor a renewal o f civic life is one of the most lasting legacies of the intense involvement of Enlightenment thought with architec ture, that most public of art forms. Turning their attention with equal vigour to theories of how governments might become agents o f reason and guarantors of individual liberties and to pragmatic debates over re forming the city, philosophers contemplated a range o f new building types and endowed them with an ethical charge. Monumental the atres, marketplaces, schools and academies, buildings for administra tion, and grand city squares were to provide the stage for a new public life, one in which citizens, or at the very least a burgeoning administra tive class and urban bourgeoisie, might assume roles rivalling the aris tocracy, clergy, and royalty who had traditionally made the city in their own image. Such buildings would not be merely symbols but veritable instruments for crafting an engaged citizenry by which the royal capi tals of London, Paris, and Berlin, as well as numerous ‘enlightened’ princely and ducal seats in Central Europe and Italy, set out to mod ernize by recapturing an imagined flourishing public life and architec tural grandeur of the Athenian agora or Roman forum. Even one of the century’s most influential books on domestic de sign pays homage to this renewed faith that architecture’s highest call ing was public building. In 1737 Blondel—teacher o f many of the architects we will encounter in this chapter—turned his attention mo mentarily from the questions o f planning private apartments in man sions, lamenting in On the Layout of Maisons de Plaisance and on the Decoration of Buildings in General the lack of public commissions in Regency France: ‘It would seem that it is the scarcity o f opportunities to erect great monuments which accustoms young architects to lose sight of the fundamental precepts of their art.’1 After 1750, attacks on Rococo fashion were launched not only in the name of reason, but in defence of the public realm. Some of the finest Neoclassical design is to be found in private interiors and furnishing, but the ethos of Neoclassicism was born o f the conviction that architecture might en gender a renewal'o'ftMc life, even a revival of that strong moral fibre of society Winclcelmann admired in ancient Greece. Literal imitationof ancient ButMi'rigs"wa,s~ntjt~p,o,ssible7for~the~rise~o''f an increasingly vi brant commercial society in Europe’s cities lengthened enormously the roster o~f buildings in which public life could be enacted. By the 1770s British architects such as Robert Adam or Henry Holland could make bids alternately for grand public buildings and for commissions for up- to-date coffee houses, gentlemen’s clubs, even taverns, all of which de manded that the architect explore the language of antiquity to craft settings for what Jurgen Habermas has called the emerging public sphere, ‘a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed’.2 Modern architectural criticism, with its implicit notion that archi tectural taste can be formed by a dialogue between an informed public and professional designers, has its roots in the heated exchanges of London’s coffee houses and liberalized press. In the early 1740s George Dance the Elder’s Mansion House, the first of many administrative buildings to transform the landscape of the capital as the apparatus of state grew increasingly independent of the court, elicited impassioned public debate and scrutiny. At issue were principally financial misman agement, expense, and corruption. Aesthetics were raised for the first time by James Ralph, whose Critical Review ofthe Publick Buildings ... In and About London appeared in 1733-34 in instalments in the Weekly Register, before being published as a book. Ralph aimed to reform his fellow citizens’ taste by analysing the qualities and faults of public buildings and sculpture, much as Blondel later sought to do for stu dents through on-site visits, a key feature of his innovative private school of architecture in Paris (founded 1743). The salon in France and exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Arts in England had made works of art issues of public debate. Increasingly ar chitecture, where issues of aesthetics and the body politic met, also be came a preoccupation of reformist discourse. The royal square in Enlightenment Paris The Place Louis xv in Paris (today’s Place de la Concorde), one of the most important undertakings of Louis xv’s reign, was born of an act of courtly diplomacy but rapidly catalysed a public debate opening new ways of discussing the city. On 27 June 1748, as the Treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle ended the War of Austrian Succession, the city council of Paris, deliberating on a way to affirm its attachment to the monarch, determined to erect a statue of Louis xv, to be entrusted to the great sculptor Edme Bouchardon ‘for a site which His Majesty will deem appropriate’. The king’s director of buildings approached the Royal Academy of Architecture, whose members frequently acted as a royal architectural advisory board ‘for plans for a public square to house the statue’. The place royale, or royal square, had been established over a century and a half earlier as an instrument of urban design and royal representation, initiated by Henri iv at the Place des Vosges (1610) and continued by Louis xiv, who promoted projects throughout France for harmonious architectural frames for the public display o f the royal por trait. But neither established designs nor traditional procedures for choosing them were respected in 1748. The academicians looked to a number of provincial cities— notably Rennes and the thriving port of Bordeaux—where new commercial and public functions had been in tegrated with the representational function of royal squares, a shift ide ally suited to Louis xv’s ambitions to project a new ethos of public beneficence. Discussion of a site for a new royal square in Paris quickly escaped the closed debate of the academy as scores of unsolicited pro posals poured in from non-members and even from amateurs whom the academicians were loath to recognize as architects. Sites through out the capital were proposed, and many designers were not content to provide a simple frame for a royal portrait, seeking to seize the occasion to address pressing needs of the city, from traffic circulation to rational izing markets and opening up space in front o f monuments encum bered by houses.