Review: Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light

Abstract

Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light Museum of Modern Art, New York City 10 March–24 June 2013 Henri Labrouste (1801–75) has one of the most durable architectural reputations of the modern era. His complex work has lent itself to regular interpretation and reinterpretation, allowing almost every generation to have the Labrouste that it wanted—to love or to hate. The recent luminous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art sought to define a Labrouste for our own times while preserving the traces of all the earlier Labroustes. That was a great deal to accomplish, and most of it got done. Figure 1 Drawings of the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve and other artifacts, displayed on tables modeled on those in the library reading room (Museum of Modern Art, New York) Like many architectural historians born in the middle years of the twentieth century, I first encountered Labrouste in the pages of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture .1 Giedion’s Labrouste was the architect of the iron book stacks of the Bibliotheque Nationale; he was portrayed as a rarity among the historical revivalists of the nineteenth century, one who dared to use the new materials of his era (iron and glass) to advance modern notions of space, which Giedion traced back to the baroque. Giedion thus made Labrouste a proto-modernist, distinguishing him from the legions of ordinary Beaux-Arts architects, whose school Le Corbusier had excoriated in Vers une architecture as a hothouse of the unnatural, “where blue hortensias and green chrysanthemums are forced.”2 To save Labrouste, however, Giedion had to ignore the green chrysanthemums of his historically ornamented facades. The ambitious and beautiful MoMA exhibition focused on the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, and organizers Barry Bergdoll (MoMA), Corinne Belier (Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine), and Marc Le Cœur (Bibliotheque Nationale de France) clearly aimed to resuscitate this modernist Labrouste. The title Structure Brought to Light , while syntactically perplexing …