THE FRENCH HÔTEL By sample Linda Student Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Architecture dissertation University of Nottingham 2005 Linda Student The French hôtel - i - THE FRENCH HÔTEL By Linda Student Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee: R. Quek sample School of Built Environment The French hôtel, explores the sociological foundations of noble domestic design in eighteenth century Paris, and its contribution to modern functional planning. It considers the representational strategies and dilemmas of French elites and their configuration in relation todissertation this extraordinary archetype. It covers the derivation and refinement of the Baroque hôtel, the Rococo hôtel, and the Neoclassical hôtel as well as debates on eighteenth century architectural theory. Linda Student The French hôtel - ii - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have helped in the writing of this dissertation, not all of them knowingly. In particular, though, I would like to thank the following for their various contributions, advice and encouragement. My tutor and mentor Raymond Quek, for his guidance, generosity in reading and making suggestions, samplehelpful advise and criticism, throughout the past year. My family, whose endless support and encouragement I would be lost without. Charlie, for always being there. My fellow students who have most kindly read and re-read my writing and whose comments have been invaluable. dissertation Linda Student The French hôtel - 1 - TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. 1 Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... 2 List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter I: Characteristics of the Court-Aristocratic Figuration .............................. 10 Chapter II: The Baroque Hôtel ....................................................................................... 14 sampleChapter III: The Rococo Hôtel ....................................................................................... 19 Chapter IV: A Monumental Exterior ............................................................................ 26 Chapter V: The Beginning of Modern Functional Planning .................................... 31 Chapter VI: Interior Decoration .................................................................................... 35 Chapter VII: Servants and their Social Status .............................................................. 38 Chapter VIII: Etiquette, Ceremony and the Power Structure of the Noble Society ....................................................................................... 40 Chapter IX: Debates on Architectural Theory and the French Hôtel .................... 44 Chapter X: The Neoclassical Hôtel ................................................................................ 49 Chapter XI: Revolution of the Arts .............................................................................. 65 Chapter XII: The Nineteenthdissertation Century ......................................................................... 71 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 72 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 75 Appendix I ......................................................................................................................... 80 Appendix II ........................................................................................................................ 92 Linda Student The French hôtel - 2 - LIST OF FIGURES Number Page 1. Ground-floor plan of the abbot’s house at Villers-Cotterets, 18 sampleby Jaques-Francois Blondel 2. Escalier du Roi at the Compiegne. 18 3. Salle à manger in the Château de Villette. 24 4. Library in the Hôtel in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. 24 5. Ground floor plan, Hôtel dedissertation Rothelin by Lassurance. 25 6. Ground floor plan, Hôtel de Desmarets by Lassurance. 25 7. Ground floor plan, Hôtel d’Amelot by Germain Boffrand. 29 8. Court, Hôtel d’Amelot by Germain Boffrand. 29 9. Ground floor plan, Hôtel d’Estrées by Robert de Cotte. 30 10. Ground floor plan, Hôtel d’Humiéres by Armand-Claude Mollet. 30 11. Ground floor plan, Hôtel de Matignon by Jean Courtonne. 30 12. Ground floor plan, Hôtel d’Evreux by Armand-Claude Mollet. 34 13. Carved and giltwood frame. 37 14. Detail of doorway in the hall of the Hôtel d’Évreux. 37 Linda Student The French hôtel - 3 - 15. I) Project for a country house, ground floor plan, Jacques-François Blondel. 61 From De la distribution. II)Project for a country house, upper floor plan, Jacques-François Blondel. 61 From De la distribution. sampleIII) Project for a country house, garden elevation, Jacques-François Blondel. 61 From De la distribution. IV) Project for a country house, detail plans of dinning room, 62 Jacques-François Blondel. From De la distribution. V) Project for a country house,dissertation Elevation of the dinning room, 62 Jacques-François Blondel. From De la distribution. VI) An orangerie with an appartement des bains, plan and elevation, 62 Jacques-François Blondel. From De la distribution. VII) Detail plans of a lieux à soupape (flush toilet), Jacques-François Blondel. 62 From De la distribution. 16. Frontispiece of Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture. 63 17. De Machy’s painting of Hôtel de Salm under construction. 63 18. Plans, section, and elevations from Hôtel de Montmorency, 64 by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. 19. Plans, section, and elevations from Hôtel Chenot, by Brunau. 68 Linda Student The French hôtel - 4 - 20. I) The Marie Plan, 1808, key plan showing the twenty detail sections. 68 II) The Marie Plan, detail sections showing the north-western area of Paris. 69 III) The Marie Plan, detail sections showing the north-eastern area of Paris. 69 IV) The Marie Plan, detail sections showing the south-western area of Paris. 70 sampleV) The Marie Plan, detail sections showing the south-eastern area of Paris 70 dissertation Linda Student The French hôtel - 5 - INTRODUCTION The study of a single building type, an aristocratic town house, associated almost entirely with one city, Paris, and with a finite period of development, c.1550-1800, might initially seem to be of modest value today. In the history of western architecture alone, the French hôtel offers merely a limited contribution sampleto a vast picture. The French hôtel in architectural scholarship has in the past been wrongly overshadowed by the perversity which seems to surround the much-criticised Rococo period, with which the hôtel is often solely associated. Emil Haufmann, for example dismisses the entire era in his Architecture in the Age of Reason, and his attitude is typical of most modernists. This puritanical attitude which has obscured the French hôtels is unfortunate. However, architectural cognoscenti have since beendissertation awakened to the fact that the changing ideas of this independent building type is in fact of great significance to current architecture; and its compositional features have persisted well into the twentieth century as a recognisable and characteristic national icon. The hôtel belongs to a particularly significant cultural outlook, which was dominated by a need to classify and then to arrange spaces with a clear articulation and hierarchy. Whilst the early type of the French hôtel is usually seen as a symbol of a previous social order, later modifications can be used to prelude expressions of modern functional design, while simultaneously affirming the importance of symbolic organisations of space. The eighteenth century hôtel is particularly revealing as it represents the cultural changes that signal the coming of mass democratic society and can be viewed as a sophisticated component of a complex pre- industrial city as well as a development of French urbanism. Linda Student The French hôtel - 6 - In Julien Guadet’s textbook written for Beaux-Arts students in the first part of the twentieth century, the eighteenth century French hôtel is seen as the birth of the ‘modern dwelling’,1 and he stresses that it had become an icon of French cultural identity. If one also looks at the houses published by L’Architecture Suisse, in the years preceding World War I, it is clear that the model of the eighteenth century French hôtel was used as a sign of cultural distinctiveness. The eighteenth century French hôtel type, even appealed to avant-garde sampledesigners. Auguste Perret who constructed the first multi-storey apartment building – 25 bis rue Franklin (Paris 1903), used a variant on the eighteenth century hôtel type, and Le Corbusier even superimposed the principles of the hôtel to his Maison Cook, creating a fully three-dimensional rendition of the eighteenth century hôtel according to the aesthetics of synthetic Cubism. As an admirer of such a significantdissertation archetype, it has been of intent to produce a study which explores its components. The forthcoming discussions shall concentrate particularly on the evolution of the French hôtel during the eighteenth