The monumental classicism taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris: plans of great clarity, composed symmetrically about axes from a governing parti, clothed in rich elevations drawn from the Renaissance and Baroque: the style of opera houses, museums, libraries and railway stations across the world.
The École des Beaux-Arts took its nineteenth-century form in 1819 and for a hundred years was the most influential school of architecture in the world. Students entered ateliers run by practising architects, competed in monthly concours, and aimed at the Prix de Rome, which sent the winner to the French Academy in Rome for several years. Americans came in growing numbers after Richard Morris Hunt, the first, in 1846; by 1900 most American schools taught on the Paris model.
The method began with the plan. Given a programme, the student made a quick sketch, the esquisse, fixing the parti (the governing idea), which could not afterwards be abandoned (Choose the parti). The plan was then developed for its marche, the sequence of spaces along the axes (The marche), and drawn with its masonry blacked in as poché (Poché: the solid drawn black). Elevation and section followed from the plan, and were rendered in ink wash with an exquisite finish that became an end in itself.
The style of the buildings was eclectic but consistently classical: French and Italian Renaissance and Baroque sources, giant orders (The giant order), rusticated bases, sculptural groups and domes. Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra (1861–75), with its grand stair and layered foyers, is the archetype. In the United States the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) launched the “American Renaissance” of McKim, Mead & White, Carrère and Hastings and Daniel Burnham: libraries, museums, capitols, railway stations such as Grand Central in New York, and the City Beautiful plans for Washington and Chicago.
Modernists attacked the Beaux-Arts after 1920 for its historicism and its paper exercises, and the school’s architecture section was dissolved in 1968. Yet its disciplines (clear circulation, hierarchy of spaces, a strong diagram, the plan as generator) passed into the modern movement through teachers trained in it, and Louis Kahn, for one, never ceased to use them.