French Architect Research Articles

The Embellishment of Brussels under Leopold I and Leopold II

After Belgian independence in 1830, Leopold I (1831–65) and Leopold II (1865–1909) wanted to transform Brussels into a a fully-fledged European capital, a city which would be worthy of the country and the king. The first king was less active in this field than his son, who had already shown a great interest in urban design and architecture during his time as crown prince. Partially financed by colonial money, Leopold II set up important projects like the Cinquantenaire, the Museum of Tervueren, and the rebuilding of the royal palaces in Brussels and Laeken (with its fine greenhouse complex), for which he called upon first-rate Belgian and French architects like Alphonse Balat, Charles- Louis Girault and Henri Maquet. Other schemes, such as the laying-out of the Montagne de la Cour and the construction of a Belgian Pantheon on the model of the German Walhalla near Regensburg, were never realised. Nonetheless, the two kings left a distinct mark on the appearance of their capital.

On the eventuality of total destruction

Claude Parent (1923–) and Paul Virilio (1932–), two renowned French architects, urbanists, and, in the case of Virilio, philosopher of technology and cultural theorist, are both ‘war babies’, as Vi...

Viejas prácticas, nuevos métodos: el diseño digital

En noviembre de 1849, un año después de haber arribado a Chile el arquitecto francés Claude Francois Brunet de Baines, por encargo del Presidente Montt, da inicio en la Universidad de Chile al primer curso de la carrera de arquitectura en nuestra universidad. Desde esa fecha, las matemáticas superiores y la geometría descriptiva han formado parte de los planes de estudios de la carrera. Este artículo analiza la evolución del foco central de investigación de los programas CAD, y su incidencia tanto en la formación del arquitecto, como en su ejercicio profesional.El contenido de los planes de estudios se ha visto afectado por los continuos progresos de la ciencia y la tecnología. El actual desarrollo de las tecnologías CAD obliga a la convergencia de varias ciencias, entre ellas biología, epistemología, informática, programación y geometrías computacionales, importantes para la comprensión de los nuevos modos de producción de la arquitectura.

HERITAGE CREATED BY EDOUARD ANDRÉ IN THE CONTEXT OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF VILNIUS CITY

Cultural and natural heritage in the vicinity of Vilnius, 3 parks at Lentvaris, Trakų Vokė and Užutrakis created by French landscape architects Edouard André and René André in 1898–1900 is very important for Vilnius city development.

François Cointereaux’s École d’ Architecture Rurale (1790-91) and its Influence in Europe and the Colonies

This article continues from our previous article on François Cointereaux, published in this journal last year. The aim of this second article is to cast light on the dissemination of the technique of pisé, as perfected by this French agriculturalist and architect, in Europe and its colonies. Although Cointereaux is considered today a minor eighteenth-century architect, the fascicles (cahiers) of his École d’Architecture Rurale were translated shortly after their publication in Paris in 1790–91 into six languages (German, Russian, Danish, English, Finnish, and Italian); these in turn attracted the interest of major architects such as Henry Holland (1745-1806) in England, David Gilly (1748-1808) in Germany, and Nicolai L’vov (1751-1803) in Russia, who founded a school of earth construction in Tiukhili near Moscow based on those of Cointereaux in Paris. Through his publications, Cointereaux generated, at the end of the eighteenth century, an almost universal interest in this vernacular material that was both cheap and abundant. His influence outside France was indeed significant, especially in Europe, where many leading architects used pisé for rural and residential buildings. The sudden interest in this vernacular technique, coinciding with the neo-classical age in revolutionary France and in Europe, might seem surprising. Doubtless this success can largely be explained by a desire to revive rural architecture, as well as by the cheap price of the material and its incombustibility. Although we have no means of assessing the number of pupils who attended Cointereaux’s schools, we do know that there were many visitors, notably foreign ones. In the period 1790–95, they were attracted by the novelty of the material and by his demonstrations of its application; this facilitated the wider dissemination of pisé architecture in Europe, North America and Australasia in 1795–1840.

La « salle du légat » de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. Une architecture oubliée de la Renaissance française

"The 'Salle du Légat' of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris : a forgotten French Renaissance building", by Flaminia Bardati. The 'Salle du Légat' of the Hôtel-Dieu, built in the 1 530s for the Cardinal-Chancellor Antoine Du Prat, was one of the rare examples of the early Renaissance architecture in Paris. Demolished by a fire in 1773, the building has long suffered critical neglect, but many unpublished documents have survived, which allow its one-time appearance to be graphically reconstructed. The main façade is one of the most significant of the early French Renaissance because, for the first time in France, the motif of the triumphal arch from the Classical world is employed. The overall design shows deep sensitivity and remarkable competence in using Italian Renaissance forms in a traditional French context. Given that the Italian architect Domenico da Cortona was working in Paris in these very years, building the Hôtel de Ville, it is tempting to propose that the Salle du Légat is also by him : certainly, it is stylistically closer to his oeuvre than to any contemporary French architect's one. The adoption of the triumphal arch motif is characteristic of the patronage of Antoine Du Prat, who requested the same form in the Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire Abbey altar. This choice could be interpreted as Du Prat's wish to give a clear message to all those who, between 1516 and 1527, had tried to oppose his immense power and to demonstrate the esteem in which he was held by both King François I and his mother, Louise de Savoie.

Toward a Theory of Critical Modernity: The Post-Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

Claude Parent is a utopian modernist French architect, and creator (with Paul Virilio) of the theory of oblique architecture, or the theory of the function of the oblique. He has been a polemicist, writer and self-publicist extraordinaire and professional architect for more than sixty years. His partnership with Paul Virilio, the self-styled “critic of the art of technology,” their work on oblique architecture from 1963-1969 and its implications for Parent’s theory of critical modernity, are the main subject of this essay.

Thomas Jefferson and François Cointereaux, Professor of Rural Architecture in Revolutionary Paris

Little is known about the contacts Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Minister to the Court of Louis XVI between 1784 and 1789 and future President of the United States, had with French architects during his residence in Paris, except those with Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721–1820), who collaborated with him on the design of the Capitol of Virginia in Richmond from 1785. We know, however, that, at the end of his stay in France, Jefferson was in close touch with the French architect and agriculturalist François Cointereaux (1740–1830), as is proven by several unpublished letters written by each of them.

Monumental urban space and national identity: the early twentieth century new plan of Thessaloniki

This paper is a contribution to the study of the ideological production of urban space through the analysis of the meaningful structure of the early-20th-century new plan of the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an examination of the ideological function of the plan for its producers as well as for the Greek public. The plan was prepared by a team led by the French architect Ernest Hébrard working in close connection with Greek government officials. It was partially implemented, and has been considered the first major urban intervention in Europe after World War I. The paper combines a historical geographical perspective with insights from the theory and methodology of semiotics. Through a holistic and meticulous analysis of the plan, its urban, aesthetic, nationalist and orientalist aspects are retraced and compared to the identity notions of the Greek politicians and the public.

Lux et Tenebris: Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton

In 1784 the visionary French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728– 1799) designed a colossal monument to Isaac Newton (1642–1727) that was both a cenotaph and a planetarium. A tribute to Newton’s contributions to astronomy, the building was conceived as a microcosm in which the night sky would be visible by day and the daytime sky by night. Entering the ‘center of gravity’ of a vast hollow globe set in cylindrical tiers, the viewer would experience the virtual reality of the starry heavens created by natural light sparkling through shafts in the exterior of the masonry sphere. At night, the interior would be transformed into day by a luminous artificial sun suspended from the vault in an armillary sphere. Belonging to the brotherhood of freemasons whose motto was ‘lux ex tenebri’ or ‘light out of darkness’, Boullée believed in the mystical origins of knowledge. His monument was a vindication of Newton whose law of universal gravitation had been attacked as ‘occult’ by Leibniz and others. Boullée’s design can be traced to Archimedes, who was the son of an astronomer and the inventor of the first planetarium c. 250 BCE. Archimedes’ tomb in Syracuse was surmounted with a sphere inside a cylinder representing his discovery of the formulas for finding their volumes and surface areas. The Newton cenotaph was also a development of the Gottorp Globe (1654-1664), a revolving planetarium made of a pierced hollow sphere that held twelve people. Although the enormity of Boullée’s plan was impossible to construct in the eighteenth century, architects treasured his evocative drawings. More than 200 years later, the architect James Stewart Polshek acknowledged the Newton cenotaph as the inspiration for his design for the planetarium of the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.

The Portuguese Precedent for Pierre Patte's Street Section

The French architect and theorist Pierre Patte, long credited for having been the first to illustrate a city street with its buildings and sewer system shown in section, probably copied the idea from a rendering made more than ten years earlier by Portuguese engineer Eugénio dos Santos as part of a project for the rebuilding of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755. The expatriate Portuguese doctor and Parisian resident António Ribeiro S anches, who was connected with the reconstruction effort, seems to have been the conduit between the two.

Daten zu Leben und Werk des Pariser Architekten Charles Moreau zwischen 1803 und 1813

Summary The present paper must be interpreted as a sequel of the work “Daten zu Leben und Werk des Pariser Architekten Charles Moreau zwischen 1760 und 1803”published in the Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, Heft 4, 2001. This essay was finished when Moreau came to Vienna in the company of Prince Nikolaus II Esterhazy at the end of 1803. The prince engaged the architect in Paris to lead the future works for the renewal of the family residence at Eisenstadt forming part of Hungary at this time. Moreau was quatered in the “Rothen Haus”which was situated in the Viennese suburb Alsergrund. In 1794 Prince Nikolaus II Esterhazy became owner of the big family estates in the kingdom of Hungary. Shortly after his installation he engaged the French architect Jean-Francois Thomas de Thomon. He was responsible for the redesign of the garden of Nikolaus II in the Viennese suburb Landstrase, which was finished already in 1795. Surprisingly Thomas de Thomon quit his contract at the beginning of 1...

Pierre-Joseph Pezerat. Architecte français à la Cour impériale du Brésil (1825-1831)

Pierre-Joseph Pezerat, a French architect at the Brazil Imperial court (1825-1831) This study deals with the realizations in Rio de Janeiro of the architect Pierre-Joseph Pezerat (1801-1872) and with the role he played in the context of the strengthening of Brazil’s independence, during the period called the “Primeiro Reinado” (the first Empire) between 1822 and 1831. The architect’s arrival in Brazil is part of a number of scientific and military missions, which were meant to “civilize”. That raises the question of the way the new Brazilian elite was recruted in Europe by the Imperial House, on one hand, and, on the other hand, that of the French stylistic influence on 19th century Brazilian architecture. We wish to show to what extent art history can and should be taken into account as an enlightening element in the history of Brazil and, more precisely, of the exchanges between France and Brazil. Our approach combines an analysis specific to art history and a study of historical sociology.

Vingt ans de recherches sur l'architecture française (1540-1708)

Twenty years of studies in French Architecture (1540-1708). This article reviews the last twenty years (1983-2003) of French historiography about the first 150 years of classical French architecture, from Serlio’s arrival in Fontainebleau to Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s death. Rather than an outdated or too uncertain terminology (manierism, baroque, classicism) new notions came to light : French rustic style, architectural licence, atticism, Grand style, notions linked to a more complex chronological sequence with successive inflexions concerning the use of ornament (1560), religious architecture (1600-1610), new commodities in private houses (c. 1630-1640), a first reform in relation with Palladianism (1638-1640) and, finally, the birth of a Grand style, inspired by Michelanglo, Bernni, Vignola and Palladio (1653-1660). Until 1988, the monographies on French architects of the period were very few, or coming from abroad, mainly from Anthony Blunt and his students. In the past twelve years, the situation reversed with a lot of monographies listed in appendix. In the same years a new attention was paid to the reconstruction on paper of the original planning, to the links between social life and room arrangements, to the evolution of each component of the French apartment, and a more precise reading of formal langague, from the smallest classical motives to the lasting taste for wall ornaments and contrasting volumes.

On specificity

The recent exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania was the occasion to review more than 40 French projects over the last two decades. Beyond the diversity of the designs themselves, we could think about the question that the French philosopher Gilles Tiberghien raised in his recent book Nature, Art, Landscape: What makes the specificity of the relationship between landscape architects and landscape? Rather ambitious, this question helps us to trace some common denominators between French landscape architects and clarifY the investigative tools they use to survey the landscape: words like ‘underscoring’, ‘re-qualifying’, ‘inscribing’ and ‘revealing’ were often encountered in the project descriptions. ‘Re-qualifying’ is, for example, a strategy that increases the degree of specificity of a place in order to make its qualities more apparent. Re-qualifying is not so nmch building an identity for a site as it is the finding of one, through a complex operation of digging, un-earthing, sorting of landscape elements that best address the project's needs.

Ruins of Ancient Rome: the designs of French architects who won the Prix de Rome, 1796-1924

Ruins of Ancient Rome: the designs of French architects who won the Prix de Rome, 1796-1924

Stranger in a Strange Land: A History of Transatlantic Exchange

THE SWISS-BORN FRENCH ARCHITECT LE CORBUSIER ARRIVED IN NEW YORK harbor on the luxury liner Normandie on October 21, 1935, on his first visit to the United States, a lecture tour organized by the Museum of Modem Art (MoMA). The American architectural community, then caught up in a painful transition from eclectic traditionalism to twentieth-century modernism, anticipated his arrival with a considerable range of emotions. Most architects and architecture students, as well as intellectuals and artists who observed the urban scene, were well aware of his purist design work, whatever their opinions of it. They knew his abstract machines for living and his plans for vast cities of widely spaced towers from museum exhibitions and from his manifesto Vers une architecture (1923), which gained wide attention in 1927 when translated as Towards a New Architecture. His oracular prose flattered Americans by suggesting that the principles of modem architecture, although stated by Le Corbusier so programmatically as to suggest commandments brought down from on high, actually owed much to the direct functional engineering of American grain elevators, bridges, and factory buildings. And now here was the author himself, come to reflect America back to itself with a European imprimatur. But the architect, unfashionably hatless, wearing odd, thick-framed glasses,

Un Français au pays du cheval : Vallin de La Mothe et Wilton House, 1755

When Henry Herbert, tenth earl of Pembroke, set out for his Grand Tour journey in 1751, he didn't travel to Rome or Naples. Instead, he went to Vienna to admire the Spanish Riding School, to Lyons to meet Claude Bourgelat, the famous horse veterinary and to Paris and Versailles, the cities La Guérinière's teaching was spreading all over Europe from. The earl of Pembroke had just inherited Wilton House, a magnificent Tudor hall transformed by Inigo Jones. The earl was eager to build a riding school to satisfy his passion for horses. He met in Paris Jean-Baptiste Vallin de La Mothe, a young and ambitious architect, trained by the famous Jacques-François Blondel and who just came from Italy. The project Vallin de La Mothe submitted to the English aristocrat is published here for the first time. It already contains all the elements that will ensure the French architect a brilliant carrier at the service of the empresses of Russia: elegance and inventiveness mixted with the wish of respecting the rule of convenance and the desires of his client. But contrary to what the local tradition reports, the earl chosed a radically different project. The history of the Wilton House riding school is a good example of the English reluctance to the French architectural manner of the XVIIIth century.

L'architecte orientaliste

Because he built little and did not get involved in great architectural debates, the orientalist architect is not very well-known. But studying such a personality allows us to know more about the orientalist architecture. The main source of architectural orientalism was the knowledge of Muslim architecture, but it varied according to différents architects, and is not included in the classical intellectual background of French architects. Travels to the Orient, numerous scientific books, articles from specialized papers, and universal exhibitions, especially the later ones where so many orientalist pavilions were built, were the best way for architects trained at the École des beaux-arts to gain knowledge. Some architects focused primarily on the study of Muslim architecture, others prefered to think only of this architecture as a componant of eclectism, and still others used orientalism as true system and not its frivolous sides. Lot of the orientalist architects followed the same career : international commissions (in Egypt and Turkey), the role played by the State commissioning buildings for exhibitions and launching an heritage policy by Historical Buildings actions in Algeria and Tunisia. Two main reasons account for the use of this special style : the desire to renew French architecture with a new architectural language in a rationalist way; or the will to offer to the public, seeking novelty and the feeling of being elsewhere, the architectural elements of their fantasies. That is why the orientalist architects formed a very mixed group and implied so many ways of conceiving orientalism.

Printing the Alhambra: Owen Jones and Chromolithography

Plans, Sections, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra (1836–45) was a landmark work, both in the history of architectural books and in the development of colour printing. Owen Jones (1809–74) and the French architect Jules Goury (1803–34) spent six months surveying the Nasrid palace in 1834 and Jones was to make a return visit to Granada three years later to undertake further research. From its conception to final printing Jones’ Alhambra project took over a decade to complete. This work represented a huge investment in time and, of course, money, but its successful completion was to establish the name of Owen Jones as an authority upon Moorish architecture and as a pioneer in the new technique of chromolithographic printing (Fig. 1). Jones is probably best remembered today for his encyclopaedic Grammar of Ornament (1856) but, since Michael Darby drew attention to Jones’ predilection for Islamic architectural design, the Alhambra has increasingly been seen as an important contribution to the nineteenth-century taste for the Oriental. Many questions remain, however, regarding the production of this book. Using the evidence of important unpublished letters, this article investigates the circumstances behind Jones’ unusual sidestep into the role of printer.