Hilary Ballon (1956–2017)

Abstract

Hilary Ballon was an outstanding scholar, teacher, curator, and administrator who stood at the top of her field both nationally and internationally. She demonstrated her prowess repeatedly during a thirty-year career through her pioneering books and articles, the exhibitions she curated, the institutions she served, and her active engagement with teaching and community service. Ballon's profile in the field of architectural history is exceptionally broad. Her abiding interest was the formation of cities, and in particular the figures who shaped them. Trained in history at Princeton and architectural history at MIT, Ballon brought to each of her books a deep understanding of the political, social, and economic forces that historical planners must negotiate in shaping great urban design. Her first two books were dedicated to the formation of seventeenth-century Paris. In The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (1991), Ballon traced the difficult rise of Henri of Navarre to the throne of France following the death of Henri III and the end of the Valois dynasty.1 To gain control over France in the period of the religious wars, Henri converted to Catholicism and rebuilt Paris as a capital city. To tell the story of his urban initiatives (the Place des Vosges and the Place Dauphine among others), Ballon had to find the papers. Previous scholars had been stumped because they sought the records in the royal archives. Ballon understood the pragmatic side of Henri and his minister the Duke of Sully and looked instead in the city archives, the Minutier central , correctly surmising that Henri would pass construction costs on to the merchants and the nobles. The book that came out of this research mapped the formation of the Paris we visit today and the shrewd strategies that underlie its present form. Describing her goal, which she …