Monumentality and the Rue Mallet-Stevens

Abstract

This essay investigates the esthetics of Robert Mallet-Stevens, using the Rue Mallet-Stevens as a means to consider his ideology. Sigfried Giedion first underscored the major theme of Mallet-Stevens' architectural theory-monumentality-an idea which the critic exploited to denounce both the architect and his street. Giedion also initiated a negative current of opinion against Mallet-Stevens, accounting for the architect's descent into professional obscurity. Monumentality as a concept is a telling theme by which to assess the Rue Mallet-Stevens and its architect. Using Mallet-Stevens' broader understanding of monumentality rather than Giedion's, three different levels of interpretation can be established in the street-architectural, urbanistic, and visionary. Architectural and urbanistic evaluations are found in Mallet-Stevens' early formal preoccupations, especially with the Wagnerschule and de Stijl; they reflect as well pragmatic responses to city planning legislation. An artistic source apart from architecture promotes the visionary interpretation, the cinema. Film provided the meaning for Mallet-Stevens' innovative forms, especially by establishing an architectural iconography related to jazz-age Paris of the 1920s. Lastly, Mallet-Stevens' idea of monumentality and Giedion's functionalistic ideology will be juxtaposed. In the Rue Mallet-Stevens, both the urbanistic and historical context is addressed rather than ignored. Mallet-Stevens' theory, in contrast to the functionalist view that promoted an architectural rupture with the past, induced forms that recognize and build upon history in a positive way.