Historical Imagination
above Drawing of Violet-le-Duc.
“Henri Labrouste : structure brought to light”; Bélier; . Bergdoll; Le Cœur; Bressani; Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.); 2012
ANATOMY OF ARCHITECTURE
or:
ON THE PREMODERN HISTORICAL IMAGINATION
Inasmuch as the 19th-century had not yet brought the second reflection on the function related to form – a founding stone of modernity, it had initiated a more complex discussion about formal expressions and material use in the industrial age, reaching beyond the stylistic debate of honoring and discarding certain periods of architectural history. The representational experiments of Henri Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc are hybrid constructs illustrating the transitional, premodern stage in the history of architecture.
The post-revolutionary aura in the 19th-century Paris set a backdrop for the new “Religion of Humanity” (1) which drove the engine of social and technical progress. The new architectural assignments that emerged : operas, theaters, and libraries, became the main preoccupation for architects educated at Parisian École Polytechnique, the institution launched shortly after the French Revolution. The teaching methods of École remained under a large influence of Durand’s “Précis des leçons d'architecture...” from 1809. Durand’s depiction of building types set on a gridded matrix derived from his interpretation of architectural history (fig.1). His reform of the architectural education endorsed modular types, simple geometrical forms and repetition, which reflected the utilitarian and economic values of the post-revolutionary French society. (2) The “poetry” of Antiquity, the beauty of proportions as well as the civic aspect of the Classical forums and theaters had for a long time been neglected in their Neo-Classical interpretations. As Antoine Picon mentions in the Introduction to the English translation of “Précis des leçons d'architecture...”, Durand’s “exclusion of metaphysical concerns defined architecture as a closed formal system subject only to its own logical processes” (3). The Classical heritage had been reduced to a stylistic convention deprived of its symbolical and civic underpinnings and thus must be challenged in face of the new industrial age.
The architect who questioned the normative character of Antiquity at the French Academy was Henri Labrouste. During the first year of his stay in Italy, Labrouste visited the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Interestingly, he did not choose to draw the 13th-century Basilica but focused on Giotto’s fresco “The Legend of St.Francis” (fig.2). The young architect selectively redrew architectural fragments of the Medieval fresco: porticos, balconies, and arches, composing them in three horizontally oriented sequences of details. (fig.3) The proportions of the single elements are very carefully redrawn yet the relationship between them remains abstract; one cannot recognize which elements were originally in the foreground or in the background of the scene. However loose the composition might appear compared with the existing standards of the French Academy, the elements were very intentionally positioned in terms of their individual viewing angles, articulating the central vanishing point of the composition. Labrouste enhanced the sense of depth by adding the shades which suggest different lighting conditions for every element. Two armchairs on the sides and the central arch remain uncolored, drawing attention to the central figure to which Labrouste gave more of an elevation reading. Compared to the expressiveness of Giotto’s frescos, Labrouste appears exquisitely analytical and selective, giving a very delicate reading of the architectural elements, which – unlike Durand’s bare geometric of columns, domes, and arches (fig.1) – remain elements of the urban fabric. It might be for this reason that in the recent MoMA exhibition catalogue (5) the analytical study from Assisi was juxtaposed with Labrouste’s later perspective rendering from Pompeii (fig.4). The serene scene of Pompeii ruins suggests the urban life that once inhabited the depicted walls and columns. Labrouste aimed to understand the incomplete and derailed parts of history, just as the one Pompeii represented. The depiction titled “House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii” reinforces a hybrid reading of the scene: the tragedy of destruction caused by Vesuvius eruption as well as the poetics of the ancient town – both before its destruction and in the moment of its ruins. At the same time, Labrouste meticulously delineated the details of structures and decorations: of different floor mosaics, types of roof tiles, adobe patterns, layers of the walls. The remains of color paint on the walls might not be accurate to what he could see but address the historical truth of polychrome decorations discovered recently to his time which rejected the “white Antiquity” dogma. Lastly, the framing of the scene in an indirect way conjectures the house typology: a central atrium surrounded by rooms.
Labrouste’s observations of the Classic architecture in Italy resembled ethnographical studies, in which the architect was not merely interested in the buildings or their ruins, but saw architecture as an organism, a construct of its social context, political organizations, and belief systems. Just as there was more to Pompeii than the relicts of the Classical architecture: its museums, coins, medals, ornamentations, and rituals, so was there more to Paris than its Neo- Classical façade: the developing capitalism and Saint-Simonianism, “Les Miserables”, miasma, epidemics and scientific progress, passages, boulevards and flâneurs.
In 1836, Labrouste became the architect in charge of the decoration of Pont de la Concorde in Paris. He treated the assignment of designing the lighting system with the same diligence as his student submissions from Italy, thus his proposal for streetlamps involved a series of composite drawings. Labrouste depicted the streetlamp (fig.5) as an architectural object, with its specific proportions, thicknesses of materials, and refined details of the iron coating while also specifying its anchoring to the pavement and electric network. The cropping of the bridge stone parapet positions the streetlamp on a pedestal, giving it a truly Classical reading; its elements resemble base, column, capital, cornices. The streetlamp was an important factor in extending the Parisian street life into late night hours and in conducting the national parades with French flags on Pont de la Concorde; its role was urban and representational nonetheless it also exemplified an industrial object. The positioning of the streetlamp – a rather mundane architectural theme – in a symmetrical manner, elevates its status and makes the drawing read almost like a poster. In a hundred years from that moment, Bauhaus scholars will release posters of table lamps ready for a mass-production. In 1840, the Parisian streetlamp remains a transitional object, nonetheless an authentic product of its time and spatial context.
In the interior elevation drawing of the Bibliothèque Sainte- Geneviève’s interior (fig.6) the architect conveys the composite, layered use of materials and structural elements. The structural layer: roof construction and iron arches transport the load into the columns. The space between the column spans is filled in with bookshelves, windows, and heavy curtains. Labrouste, once again, conveys a hybrid reading of structure and infill, interior and exterior, linear iron elements and color-infilled surfaces. The iron arches reminisce of Parisian gallery-streets; Labrouste, just as in his earlier drawings, recalls here the urban aspect. The perspective view of Sainte-Geneviève (fig.7) might as well be the prototype of universal space, the monumental interior could become a gallery, a passage, a market, a factory. It was the infill of books and reading desks that made it ultimately to a monumental library, a temple of knowledge and contemplation, or a space for the community where reading and studying were no longer a lonesome act.
Labrouste was named “the initiator of a veritable revolution in architecture” by Viollet-le-Duc (6) who indeed extended the experimental, imaginary thinking about architectural space and materials in the second half of the 19th century. Viollet-le-Duc’s representation of a monumental, column-free space from 1872 (fig.9) remained inspired more by Gothic than Classical heritage, nonetheless, in a similar way to Labrouste, he challenged the notion of iron structure and the composite use of materials. In Viollet-le-Duc’s imaginary space (fig.9), the load-transferring parts of vaults are substituted with iron joints and their anatomical nature could not be further from the Beaux-Arts mannerism. Bressani refers to the “physiology” (7) of Viollet-le-Duc’s architecture and his creation of new, fictional life forms. While remaining a rationalist, Viollet-le-Duc draws his imaginative forms in a biologically scientific rather than in a mathematical way.
Both Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc rejected the Neo-Classical vocabulary with its mathematical “kit of architectural elements” logic, offering a more experimental and hybrid reading of history. Though each of them valued different historical periods (Classicism vs Gothic), their analysis carried anatomical underpinnings. In Viollet-le-Duc’s case, the parallels to anatomy might be more literal (fig.10) than by Labrouste, yet the latter one understood architecture as an organism of which dissected parts concerned the social, political, urban and cultural components. Labrouste disassembled Giotto’s townscapes to the single urban elements and Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to its bones, flash, and skin: structure, infill, and ornamentation, only to later offer a reading of an entire scene, a composite architectural body.
A parallel to anatomical studies would not be complete without mentioning the 19th century fossilist Georges Cuvier, famously claimed by Balzac as „the greatest poet of our century” who was able to “reconstruct worlds from whitened bone” (8). Cuvier proved that the analysis of one fossil bone was sufficient to synthesize the skeleton of an extinct species. From the single fossils found in the archeological excavations he tried to infer the entire skeleton of extinct Mammoth and American Mastodon.
The comparison to anatomy aims not only to highlight the “part to whole” relationship but also to reflect on the individual form of a bone, the one predisposing to its function and position in the body, carrying imprints of its connection to other bones. At the turn of the 20th-century the biologist Raoul Heinrich Francé described microscopical images of bacteria using the term of “the optimal form”, claiming that the laws of nature were always practical and therefore all its forms must derive from a specific function they intend to serve.
Inasmuch as the 19th-century had not yet brought the second reflection on the function related to form – a founding stone of modernity, it had initiated a more complex discussion about formal expressions and material use in the industrial age, reaching beyond the stylistic debate of honoring and discarding certain periods of architectural history. Durand’s dogma of architecture being a closed logical system was challenged by a more imaginative yet still analytical approach to the Classical period of Henri Labrouste and the anatomical studies of Medieval architecture of Viollet-le-Duc. The outcome of their experiments is a hybrid construct illustrating the transitional, premodern stage in a history of architecture. Whereas the transitional moment might appear inasmuch poetic in Sainte-Geneviève as bizarre in some of Viollet-le-Duc’s depictions, it liberates from the limited understanding of the Classical canon, allowing for architectural innovation and the evolution of practice, paving its way into Modernity.
1 from French Religion de l'Humanité or église positiviste; a secular religion created by Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy
2,3 “Précis of the Lectures on Architecture with Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture”; Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand; Introduction by Antoine Picon; Translation by David Britt; The Getty Research Institute Publications Program, Los Angeles, 2000
5,6 Corinne Bélier, Barry Bergdoll and Marc Le Coeur, “Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light”, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013
7 Martin Bressani - The Life of Stone: Viollet-le-Duc's Physiology of Architecture - May 1996
The profile graphic of the essay is from Francé R.H, “Plants as inventors”, A. and C. Boni, New York 1923
This essay was written as a reflection on Prof. Guido Zulliani’s class THE ARCHITECT’S GAZE at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, in May 2019
All copyrights reserved to © Natalia Wyrwa 2020.
