European Architecture 1750-1890

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 Nationalism and Stylistic Debates in Architecture The character of whole nations, cultures, and epochs speaks through the totality of their architecture, which is the outward shell of their being. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichte Betrachtungen (lectures given in 1868-71), translated as Reflections on History, London, 1943 The conviction that architecture might represent, even sustain, the glory of kingdoms can be traced to the dawn of civilization, but the no tion that architecture can bear the stamp of national character is a modern one born of eighteenth-century historical thinking and given political currency in the wake o f the French Revolution. O f all the new functions architecture was called upon to perform, few were so ideo logically charged as building the identity and reinforcing the claims to naturalness of nation-states. As the map of Europe was repeatedly re drawn, architecture was called upon to rally and focus loyalties and to grant the aura of a glorious past to even the most recently contrived na tional boundaries. The shift in meaning o f the notion of architectural ‘character’ from its eighteenth-century sense of modes o f expression within a universal vocabulary to the nineteenth-century concern with national styles did not occur without considerable resistance from those who believed that architectural ideals transcended vagaries of time and place. Proposals for ‘national orders’ o f architecture were advanced episodi cally in the eighteenth century. But Sebastien Leclerc’s ‘French order’ of 1714, with its fieur de lys, or James Adam’s ‘British Order’ o f 1764, with its St George’s lions, were emendations to the Classical vocabu lary, enhancements of the rhetorical capacity of the orders handed down from antiquity and codified by Renaissance treatises. The evolu tion of post-Classical antiquarian studies from curiosity with artefacts to the polemical position that such research provided models for specifically national architectures was one of the most potent of chal lenges posed to the transcendent validity of Classicism. Johann Fischer von Erlach, whose 1721A Plan ofC ivil and Historical Architecture included non-western architectural styles, noted that ‘Nations differ no less in their taste for architecture than in food and raiment ...’1 Winckelmann, taking up Montesquieu’s association of political and legal systems in different cultures with geography and cli mate, asserted that Greek excellence in the arts was a direct result of a felicitous climate, political system, and society. But neither Winckelmann nor his Neoclassical followers, including such powerful figures as Quatremere de Quincy of the French Academy, whose influ ence remained strong until the mid-nineteenth century, would em brace the relativist implications of their own historical explanations. The stage was set not only for a battle of styles, but for a tug-of-war be tween universal and relativist aesthetic models. Political as much as aesthetic convictions were at stake. Inspired by Rousseau’s pleas for love of homeland as a great civilizing virtue and by Herder’s appeals to sustain the distinctiveness of national cultures as preserved in dialects, folk songs, and the like, the intellectual project of patriotic nationalism was initially staged as a progressive and liberating force compatible with the Enlightenment notions of progress and poised against received ideas. The Revolution gave a new impetus with its cult o f‘the fatherland’, and its investment of the rights and the identity of nationhood in citizens rather than subjects; nationalism would fill a void left by older allegiances to church, crown, and aristo cratic privilege. But patriotism was one of the most contradictory ex ports of the Revolution. As French armies advanced through Europe, initial enthusiasm for new democratic ideals turned into a reaction against French imperialism, awakening a sense of national identity even in the fractured political landscape of Central Europe. Pluralism and revivalism In addition to the credo of universal Classicism, two new, and often contradictory, attitudes about historical style in architecture were dis cernible by the early nineteenth century. Both would be called into the service of forming symbols and building national identity. Pluralism advocated the simultaneous use of the expanded range of styles anti quarian study had made accessible. Revivalism held that a single histor ical model was appropriate for modern architecture. Each position had its roots in eighteenth-century explorations of the ways in which archi tecture conveys meaning. Pluralism, cultivated first in the quest for ‘va riety’ and the evocation of different times and places in picturesque landscape gardens, had, by the early nineteenth century, found spokes men who associated historical architectural styles with the various new buildings required by contemporary society. Thus the emotive argu ments of the doctrine o f association were joined with the ever-growing interest in the sequence and taxonomy of architectural styles to produce a veritable palette of historical building idioms usable towards new ends: Egyptian for prisons, Gothic for churches, or Italian Renaissance 66 John Foulston for banks and exchanges, for instance. These choices were meant to ac View of Devonport, near tivate prevailing cultural associations: the pharaohs with death and eter Plymouth, 1820s, including nity, the Middle Ages with Christianity, or the Medici with the rise of an ‘Egyptian’ library, a ’Hindoo’ nonconformist banking and modern commerce. Greek architecture was invested with chapel, a ‘primitive Doric’town the new ideals of liberty and thus all its links with antiquarianism were hall, and a street of houses branded as progressive. Thus, for instance, in the early 1820s the leading with a Roman Corinthian order The goal of rendering new Regency architect of the west of England, John Foulston, composed a building types meaningful was townscape at Devonport [66] in which radical stylistic contrasts were little different from that intended to create a legible landscape. essayed decades earlier by Ledoux [48], butthe means Revivalists, despite frequent disagreements over issues of which changed radically as the quest historical style was appropriate, none the less shared the goal of a styl for character shifted from a istic consensus. Whether their choice was Classical, medieval, or flexible Classical vocabulary to the del i berate juxta position of Renaissance, all revivalists shared the strategy of advocating a particu historical styles. lar style with explanations drawn from national history, itself one of the great enterprises of historians in the early nineteenth century. A single historical period— increasingly specific in its definition— was claimed to be the only one capable of providing models grounded in national traditions, institutions, and values. Issues of style became matters of state. For several generations historical style loomed as one of the most pressing issues in architecture, each new debate viewed as another skir mish in an ongoing ‘battle of styles’.

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