Enlightenment and Revival

By the middle of the eighteenth century the classical tradition that Brunelleschi had revived was three hundred years old, and it had grown elaborate. The churches of Rome and Bavaria curved and rippled; Paris salons dissolved in gilded shells; every rule of the orders had been bent somewhere by someone. At the same time the intellectual climate had changed. The Enlightenment asked of every institution what reason justified it, and architecture could not escape the question. Its answers (sometimes austere, sometimes visionary) produced Neoclassicism, and then, as the nineteenth century learned more history than any age before it, a bewildering choice among revived styles.

Custom or reason?

The first crack in the edifice had opened a century earlier, in the French Royal Academy of Architecture. Claude Perrault argued in the 1670s and 80s that the proportions of the orders pleased only by habit, since the ancients themselves had varied them (Positive and arbitrary beauty); François Blondel, the Academy’s first director, replied that proportion was grounded in nature like musical harmony (Proportion is natural, like harmony). If Perrault was right, the authority of the treatises was a convention, and architecture needed some other foundation. The eighteenth century went looking for it: in origins, in construction, and in use.

Laugier’s hut

The most influential answer came from a Jesuit preacher, Marc-Antoine Laugier, whose Essai sur l’architecture appeared anonymously in 1753. Laugier imagined the first man building his first shelter: four trees as uprights, branches laid across them, others leaned together to make a roof. This primitive hut, he argued, contains everything essential to architecture (the column, the entablature and the pediment), and every later building is good in so far as it stays true to it (The primitive hut). The second edition of 1755 opened with an engraving after Charles Eisen of Architecture pointing a child towards just such a hut, and the image became the emblem of the age.

℟The primitive hut

Judge every building against the first shelter: four trees for columns, branches laid across them for the entablature, and a pitched roof whose end makes the pediment. These three are the essential parts; all else is added.

From the hut Laugier derived a strict code. A column should stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature, never engaged in a wall or replaced by a pilaster (The column must stand free); a pediment, being the end of a roof, cannot be broken or curved or set on a side wall; orders should not be piled storey on storey on church fronts (Licences to avoid). His ideal church had free-standing columns carrying straight entablatures, with vaults above, combining Greek clarity with Gothic lightness; Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, begun in 1757 and now the Panthéon, was received as that ideal realised.

℟The column must stand free

Let columns stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature directly; do not engage them in walls, replace them with pilasters, or set them on pedestals.

Archaeology and the Greek Revival

Laugier had never seen a Greek temple, but others were about to. The excavations at Herculaneum (from 1738) and Pompeii (from 1748) revealed Roman domestic decoration unknown to the Renaissance; travellers measured the Doric temples of Paestum south of Naples, and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (first volume 1762) published the Parthenon and the Erechtheion in accurate engravings. The Greek Doric column (massive, fluted, without a base) shocked eyes accustomed to Vignola, and then became a symbol of primitive strength and republican virtue.

Between about 1790 and 1840 the Greek Revival spread across Europe and America: the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Schinkel’s Altes Museum, Smirke’s British Museum, the Walhalla above the Danube, and in the United States a tide of temple-fronted banks, courthouses, churches and houses. Rome was not abandoned (Napoleon’s Paris preferred imperial Roman grandeur, and Jefferson modelled the Virginia State Capitol on the Maison Carrée at Nîmes), but the choice between Greece and Rome was now a choice, argued in books and justified by history. That self-consciousness is the mark of the whole century.

In Britain the new antiquity arrived by two routes. Robert Adam, back from Rome and Split in 1758, created a light, linear decoration of Roman and “Etruscan” motifs (fans, urns, garlands, delicate pilasters) that swept through country houses such as Kedleston and Syon and made Neoclassicism a fashion as much as a doctrine. The sterner Greek manner followed a generation later, in William Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge and in the porticoes of Edinburgh, “the Athens of the North”. In Russia, Catherine the Great and her successors built a Neoclassical St Petersburg; in Germany Karl Friedrich Schinkel gave Prussia a civic architecture of astonishing restraint, and Leo von Klenze built a Greek Munich for King Ludwig I.

Visionaries and the method of Durand

In the last decades of the ancien régime two French architects pushed the search for first principles towards pure geometry. Étienne-Louis Boullée drew a cenotaph for Isaac Newton as a sphere 150 m high, pierced with holes to imitate the stars; Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built the royal saltworks at Arc-et-Senans on a great semicircle and imagined an ideal town around it. Their drawings, mostly unbuilt, reduced architecture to cubes, cylinders, pyramids and spheres under raking light.

Boullée’s pupil Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand drew a very different conclusion. Teaching engineers at the new École polytechnique after 1795, he rejected both the primitive hut and the analogy of the human body. The purpose of architecture, he said, is utility; its principles are fitness (solidity, healthiness, convenience) and economy (symmetry, regularity, simplicity); beauty follows when these are met (Fitness and economy). His Précis des leçons (1802–05) taught a method anyone could apply: draw the axes, lay a grid of equal squares, place the walls on the lines and the columns at the intersections, and combine a small repertory of elements into any building (Axes first, then walls, then columns, Few elements, many combinations).

Durand’s grid is easy to caricature as mechanical, and nineteenth-century critics did. But it was the first theory of architecture to treat a building as an assembly of standard parts on a regular framework, and its descendants include the planning grids of railway stations, hospitals and office buildings and the modular coordination of industrialised building.

The Beaux-Arts: the plan as generator

The other great school of the century was the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, refounded in 1819, which trained architects in ateliers and judged them in competitions culminating in the Prix de Rome. Its method began, like Durand’s, with the plan, but it cared intensely about the plan’s character. A student given a programme had twelve hours to make an esquisse fixing the parti, the governing idea of the scheme, and was bound to develop that idea and no other (Choose the parti). The plan was judged by its marche, the sequence of spaces experienced along its axes (The marche), and drawn with its solid masonry blacked in as poché, so that rooms appeared as shaped voids (Poché: the solid drawn black).

Beaux-Arts elevations drew on the French and Italian Renaissance and Baroque (giant orders, rusticated bases, domes and sculpture), but the plan was the thing. Charles Garnier’s Opéra in Paris (1861–75) is the archetype, its grand stair a theatre in which the audience performed its own arrival. Americans trained in Paris, from Richard Morris Hunt onwards, carried the method home: the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), the libraries and railway stations of McKim, Mead & White and Carrère and Hastings, and the City Beautiful plans for Washington and Chicago. Much of the civic architecture of the world between 1880 and 1930 was composed on Beaux-Arts principles, often over hidden steel frames.

The Gothic Revival

Gothic had never been quite forgotten in England, and in the eighteenth century it returned as a picturesque taste: Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, begun in 1749, is a pleasure house of plaster fan vaults and battlements. In the 1830s the revival became a crusade. Augustus Pugin, a convert to Catholicism, argued that Gothic was the only Christian architecture and, more lastingly, that it was the only honest one. His True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) opens with two rules (Pugin’s two great rules):

The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.

Measured by these rules, Gothic buttresses, pinnacles, vaults and open timber roofs are construction made beautiful, while a classical portico stuck on a brick box is a sham. Pugin designed the detail of the new Palace of Westminster with Charles Barry, and the Ecclesiologists of Cambridge prescribed the correct plan and detail of the Anglican church, with a steep roof (The steep roof), a distinct chancel and fourteenth-century tracery, for hundreds of new parishes at home and across the empire.

℟Pugin’s two great rules

Let there be no feature about a building that is not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; and let all ornament be the enrichment of the essential construction.

John Ruskin gave the argument a wider public and a new direction. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) forbids three kinds of deceit: false structure, false materials and machine-made ornament (The Lamp of Truth). The Stones of Venice (1851–53) finds in the rough, varied carving of Gothic the signs of free and happy workmen, in contrast to the dead perfection demanded by industry. Ruskin’s taste for the coloured Gothic of Venice and Verona produced a High Victorian Gothic of striped brick and marble; his social argument became the seed of the Arts and Crafts movement (Arts and Crafts).

℟The Lamp of Truth

Commit no architectural deceit: do not suggest a structure other than the real one, do not paint or carve one material to look like another, and do not pass off cast or machine-made ornament as handwork.

In France the Gothic Revival took a more rational turn. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who restored Notre-Dame in Paris, the walls of Carcassonne and dozens of other monuments, read Gothic not as a Christian style but as a structural system in which every rib, flying buttress and pinnacle had a job to do: an engineer’s architecture in stone. His Dictionnaire raisonné (1854–68) and Entretiens argued that the principles of Gothic construction should be applied to the new materials of iron and glass, a lesson that Art Nouveau and the Chicago architects would take to heart. His restorations, which often completed buildings as he thought they should have been, were exactly what Ruskin’s Lamp of Memory condemned.

Semper and the question of style

By mid-century the architect could choose Greek for a museum, Gothic for a church, Italian Renaissance for a club and Romanesque for a railway station, and the choice itself had become the subject of a debate known in England as the “battle of the styles”. The German architect Gottfried Semper tried to move beyond it with a theory of how styles arise. In The Four Elements of Architecture (1851) he replaced Laugier’s hut with a Caribbean hut he had seen at the Great Exhibition in London: a hearth, a roof on posts, an enclosure of woven mats and a raised floor (The four elements). Each element descended from a craft (ceramics, carpentry, weaving, masonry) and carried that craft’s forms into architecture long after the material had changed. Since walls began as textiles, their surface was by nature a dressing, the Bekleidung.

℟The four elements

Understand every building as a combination of four elements (the hearth, the roof on its supports, the enclosure and the mound), each descended from a craft: ceramics, carpentry, weaving and masonry.

Semper’s theory, like Pugin’s and Durand’s, outlived the styles that accompanied it. The century that began with Laugier’s demand that architecture return to its origins ended with a set of principles (truth to construction, truth to materials, the plan as generator, the building as an assembly of elements) that the architects of iron, steel and concrete would turn against historical style itself. Their story continues with the Chicago School, Art Nouveau and the modern movement.