July 22: Of Lace Cuffs and Iron Bars

On this day in 1713 Jacques Germain Soufflot was born.

People hear “Soufflot” and typically imagine something soft and sweet, delicate and fragile; something that might deflate if you make a big noise in the kitchen.  And indeed their opinion about high-maintenance, puffy baked egg dishes that really aren’t that tricky are likewise mistaken about this fancily-named elaborately-wigged architect. In spite of the lace cuffs and marble volutes, Soufflot was likewise not so fussy nor hardly oblivious to the harsh and tough realities of real building. Definitely a player in the generation that invented Neo-Classicism–but there’s not much dainty about that except for the occasional guilloche–, that group also knew how to investigate, invent, and really build.  Soufflot’s was the generation of initial scientific archaeology and the boom of the Industrial Revolution.  It’s to Soufflot’s credit that you don’t see the deep research and technical finesse of the buildings; you see elegance and beauty, light and color; the nécessités are hidden like the undergarments they are beneath and within the finely tailored frock.

Take his most famous building, the Church of  Sainte-Geneviève (the Panthéon) that he designed starting in 1755. No, just take its portico.  It’s a Roman temple front, but not just a copy of some pile of ruins.  Setting aside the whole matter of Soufflot’s treatment of ornament and proportions that differed from ancient practice, consider the structure.  Soufflot had researched antiquity enough to know that the Romans didn’t rest flat lintels on columns as they (and he) appeared to do; by the Empire they employed shallow arches to distribute the weight of the architrave to each column, making the structure more efficient (it’s right there at the Temple of Saturn if you bother to look for it).  Soufflot adopts that idea and catapults it into the industrial age, knitting his stonework together with enough iron bands to make Abraham Darby dizzy.

Just one petit exemple reminding us that Neo-Classical buildings, like their architects, are more than just a pretty face.

Fun Fact:Vincent La Chapelle, chef to Louis XV, is credited with the first citation of a soufflé in a cookery book within a decade or so of Soufflot’s great church.

Image: construction diagram of the portico,  Sainte-Geneviève

July 04: In Centre Square (a.k.a. Another Excuse To Talk About Latrobe)

This is the day in 1812 portrayed in John Lewis Krimmel’s painting, Fourth of July in Centre Square.

In case you skipped Genre Day in Art History 101, genre paintings are images of everyday life (rather than portraits of “important” people, or scenes of historical and/or mythological one-time events [not that the Muse distinguishes]).  Genre scenes show normal people doing normal things.  But they’re not laborious versions of snapshots.  A good genre artist draws you in with an ostensibly familiar scene, but then surprises or engages with the particular handling of details to communicate a more significant idea than you might first expect.

Krimmel (1786-1821) was a pretty great painter of genre subjects, as revealed by this view of the square that is  smack-dab in the center of the grid that William Penn devised as his great town in the seventeenth century.  Although all the patriotic Philadelphians (and their dogs) (the cats stay home; cats are Fascist) portrayed here provide ample provision for the dissertation writer of American art/history/material culture/life, the Muse of course looks to the painting’s architectural background.  Rarely is any part of a genre scene is left ambiguous (unless the whole point is ambiguity).  This one is pretty clear.

Of the five squares that Penn laid out, only this one was to be built upon, with some kind of public building (it’s the site where that ponderous pile they call “City Hall” now stands).  During Krimmel’s short life, Centre Square was the setting of a small marble Neo-Classical gem designed by American architecture’s own Founding Father, B. Henry Latrobe (he of the great Oration and lots of super buildings).

What is this structure that is so significant that it earns a place amidst a lively celebration of American independence?  A house of government?  A church?  Thomas Jefferson’s tea hut & cravat closet?  No.  It’s a pump house.  It held the steam-powered equipment that propelled water through the city, and it may be the perfect monument of the early National period.  Built in 1801, demolished in 1829 (again we say: Well done, Philly), the neat white marble prism was topped by a cylinder, ideal forms in which Classical quotations appear in the form of a pair of Greek Doric columns and a saucer dome.  Here, the oculus of the Pantheon is not used so much to let light in as to allow steam to escape.  This was, after all, an elegant case for rugged industrial equipment that pumped water from the Schuylkill River (on the west edge of town) into the homes, businesses and institutions of the growing city (clustered on the east side).  No mere technological necessity, the Pump House was a tool of Republican virtue (as such it is one of a long, long line of technological innovations that have been used as the means to tell the “American story”; ‘Merca loves its gizmos)–one that made fresh water available to residents across the city, an amenity enjoyed in neither London nor Paris.  As such, it was rightly celebrated in Latrobe’s rich architecture and by Krimmel as the proper backdrop for patriotic celebration of citizens.

Image: Fourth of July in Centre Square (John Lewis Krimmel, 1812)

July 03: the original stylist

On this day in 1728 Robert Adam was born.

Born into one of those great eighteenth-century builder-architect families who built up most everything in Great Britain, Adam (d. 1792) might have been expected to do something in the line of speculative row houses or overseeing the construction of the occasional manor house.  The brilliance of his achievement threw all the accomplishments of his family, not to mention every other Scottish architect you can name, into murky shadow.  (“Egadz,” the Muse hears you say: “She forgot Mackintosh, peace and blessings be upon his name.”  No, no she didn’t.)

The family’s earned wealth supported young Adam’s travels through Europe in the mid-1750s.  By taking part in the Grand Tour, which was still a kind of novel thing at the time, he was one of the first English-speaking architects to take in the glories of Rome–meaning the empire.  He stayed in the capital for some time, but also traveled as far as Dalmatia (you call it Croatia now), where Diocletian had built a humongous pile.  He also cultivated relationships among people who would be important to his development, including other designers interested in poking around Roman ruins and then doing something with whatever inspired them (like the French Clerisseau and Italian Piranesi); he also met wealthy British Grand Tourists who supported his work once he was launched back in England.

When Adam started his practice, he did not just commence designing buildings for money; he sparked an international revolution in architectural design that was so immediately popular and continues to be so engaging and teachable he became one of the three architects to have a style named after himself.  The Adamesque or Adam Style was his particular brand of Neo-Classicism, that eighteenth-century approach to appropriating the forms and elements of Classicism in an individual, but still methodological way.  Ledoux, Latrobe, and the sublime Soane were all Neo-Classical, but without too much study one can recognize the clear differences between the way each, say, loved on a volute.  Adam’s style drew from a particular kind of Classical remnant in the creation of elegant architecture of powerful but graceful facades and equally exquisite interiors.  It is, indeed, inside, where Adam seems most at home (which puts one in mind of Cecil Vyse, but Adam was never quite so pompous).  Adam’s interiors brilliantly manage domestic proportions and color–two requirements that too many architects tend to forget.  Classical forms are fully recognizable in Adam’s houses (most of his great work was residential), but they have been treated with Adam’s light, elegant hand, cast in lithe, delicate forms and stunning color schemes.  Spend some time with Kedleston, Home House, Kenwood, Osterley and this tea house (or any of the other hundreds of full houses or bits of rooms and furniture out there), just part of the box of chocolates that the first great stylist left to us all.

Image: Osterley

June 13: Bulfinch Abroad

During this month in 1785 Charles Bulfinch went to Europe.

It’s often observed in history that family wealth (either through inheritance or marriage) assists an architect getting started in the profession.  For Bulfinch (1763-1844) things went a little differently.  To be sure, familial scrilla supported his extravagant trip abroad in a time that only the creamiest of the cream sent their sons on a two-year-long Grand Tour with the intention to stock a young gent with the right books and engravings and perfume and, in this case, the resultant gentlemanly taste that equipped him to design buildings as a “gentleman.”  But then it was the reversal of family fortunes that made it necessary for Bulfinch to make that paper on his own.  Law school was not yet the last-ditch of the uncertain, so Bulfinch thought to himself: Why not architecture?

Again, family connections connected Bulfinch with some pretty impressive folks, like, oh, Thomas Jefferson, a mate he caught up with in England.  In London, Bulfinch was especially impressed by the modern English architecture as defined by the rather predictable William Chambers and dainty and pretty work of Robert Adam.  (One wonders how the Federal Style might have advanced in America had Bulfinch instead spent his time poking around whatever was falling out of John Soane’s brilliant head at the time.)  Back in the States, Bulfinch made a pretty impressive name for himself, practicing in a sparing, elegant Neo-Classicism.  Observe just a few of his projects, mostly in Boston: the first Harrison Gray Otis House (1796), First Church of Christ, Lancaster (1815), Massachusetts State House (1798), and forgive him the unfortunate first dome of the Capitol in washington (1824).  The achievement of the Tontine Crescent (1793, above) more than makes up for that crummy dome.  Pity those curving rowhouses were knocked down in 1858, replaced by the kind of blocky thing they liked to build in Boston ca. 1860, which were then destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, which was set by Bulfinch’s ghost.

Image: Bulfinch’s plan and elevation for the Tontine Crescent

April 29: Architecture or Revolution

On this day in 1773 King Louis XV signed the edict authorizing the construction of the Saline Royale.

As a highly valuable commodity, salt was taxed and regulated by the crown; its manufacture deserved architecture that expressed its status in French culture.  The new saltworks built at Chaux were planned to be an improvement on the traditional system (that relied on evaporation) through their mechanized processes and the overall planning of the operation.  Architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) turned his Enlightenment mind and Neo-Classical taste to the problem of a complex organization comprising workers’ housing, a house for the director, administrative offices, a chapel, stables, and the great saltworks proper: two buildings measuring about 240 by 85 feet in which the drying ovens, heating pots and salt stores were maintained.  Ledoux arranged the different elements according to their hierarchy, which was expressed in the strong formality of a half-circle.  The whole plan imposed geometric order on the salt-making process.  Individually, each building was articulated in Ledoux’s particular brand of Neo-Classicism, based in clear, clean geometries, simple proportional relationships, bold quotations from Classical antiquity (oftentimes the way-back Greek world: Stuart may have loved Athens; Ledoux preferred Paestum) and sometimes vernacular forms, and the occasional whimsical invented ornament.  Together, they have a clear aesthetic character, although individual functional parts of the whole (like this and this and this) distinguish the diverse functions of the place.  The expression of the activities housed within–named by the French architecture parlante–is “spoken” through details like the “grotto” that drips briny water.

One of the great Neo-Classicists, Ledoux was adopted (hijacked?) by Modernists in the mid-twentieth century, made over as an architect more interested in geometry and pure form than precedent and fussy detail.  This is, of course, nonsense.  To Ledoux and his generation (including Sir John Soane, Thomas Jefferson, B. Henry Latrobe, Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau,) manipulation of, or expression within, the adopted parameters of Classicism may have been a goal, but never was it an interest to ignore the heritage of Classicism. Even so, by mid-century Ledoux and a few other French architects were labeled as “revolutionary;” and we suppose you can see a formal link between him and Le Corbusier if, maybe, you leave the book on the other side of the room, take off your glasses, squint, and can thus only see white blobs.  (This approach will also make petits fours and Bibendum reasonable points on the timeline, proving that indeed Le Corb was the culmination of centuries worth of French culture.)  But seriously, if Ledoux’s work was a “revolution,” it was painfully short-lived.  This is especially true in his particular context in the French capital, where “revolution” meant something a little more serious in the late eighteenth century than architects trying out new ideas.  Because of his royal connections, Ledoux was imprisoned for a time during the Revolution, only narrowly escaping the guillotine.  Many of his works, because of their patronage, were destroyed during his life.

Revolutionary architecture, out to upset the baguette cart?  Non.  Spectacular, creative, interesting work within the marvelous and elastic language of Classicism that allows so many personal expressions within its stretchy parameters?  Absolument.

Image: the plan of the Saltworks (from this site)

April 13: Mr. Jefferson

On this day in 1743 Thomas Jefferson was born.

A muse can hardly help but feel warmly for this day and the person it celebrates, for his heart thumped with a certain warmth for her, too.  Jefferson (d. 1826) was a rare soul of tremendous achievement, and among all people who it’s hard for Clio to shut up about, it’s really hard to shut up about Mr. Jefferson.

Shall she wax on about his desire to stay out of public life but, once he was compelled into it, his extraordinary service to his colony and later country?  Shall she praise his efforts on behalf of public education and religious liberty?  Shall she swoon over his violin-playing and ice-cream eating?  Shall she drop 100,000 words on his involvement with major public works (the plan of Washington, the design of the US Capitol, the State House of Virginia and the University of Virginia) or his extraordinary residential projects (how could she choose between Monticello and Poplar Forest?)?

She shall not.  She shall talk about a garden pavilion, which encapsulates some of Mr. Jefferson’s finest qualities in 185 square feet.

Neither Order nor dome (and Clio’s people know, Clio loves a dome) ornaments this wee shelter, articulated by four simple brick walls with arched openings hung with floor-length windows that double as doors, with a thin “Chinese” rail at the top.  Room inside for one or two chairs for people taking rest among the large (1000 x 80 ft.) olitory.  “Olitory” means “kitchen garden” for those of you who didn’t circulate in certain circles in the eighteenth century, but it means more than just a place to grow your peas, for if you call  that place where you grow your peas an “olitory,” you’re doing more than growing peas.

Maybe you’re growing over two dozen variety of peas, because they’re your favorite vegetable, but also, because you have a mammoth brain that just cannot quit, even when you’re thinking about veg.  Maybe the whole olitory is a giant, practical experiment in agriculture, and you keep meticulous notes about the behavior of the plants and the passing of the seasons, the qualities of the weather.  Maybe you take these notes in small booklets as you kneel in the red Virginia dirt, and carry them to the little pavilion to consider and study.  And then maybe you set them aside and pull out another volume: maybe it’s modern poetry, or ancient philosophy.

And maybe you’re doing this as recreation in your retirement from public life, because you’re the seventy-year-old former president, vice president (the one who made the Louisiana Purchase), secretary of state, ambassador to France, author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia, and a dozen other spectacular lines, any one of which on a single resume in one family would be cause for multi-generational pride.  But you did it all in your thirty-five year career.  And for you, those years you spent in the halls of power, some of which you helped to design, just as you designed the course for the country you ran for a time, were years well spent, although you count the greatest achievements as the documents you put in place that honored and protected political rights, religious liberty, and intellectual freedom.  And as great as your amazing Neo-Classical house is, you really just want to sit in a small brick pavilion, meditate on your peas, and watch the sun set over your garden.

Image: reconstructed garden pavilion at Monticello, orig. 1812 (Clio’s picture)

February 21: Outdoing the Pharoahs

On this day in 1885 the world’s tallest obelisk was dedicated.

This day had been a long time coming–surprisingly so, considering that a monument dedicated to the first US president seems like a no-brainer, and a desire for one certainly had a lengthy history.  Calls for such a monument dated to the late eighteenth century and revved up after Washington’s death in 1799.  But it took until the mid-1830s for a competition to be launched.  Robert Mills, who made a career out of big public buildings in places like Washington, was named the winner.  As a designer he mostly favored the Greek style (as you can see from this thing in Charleston) and had some experience with monuments (as you can see from this thing in Baltimore) and also had a thing for Egypt (as you will see in a moment).  Not content to reference just one historic dynasty in his recognition of the American hero, Mills’ initial design proposed an Egyptian obelisk, taller than any the Egyptians ever built, that would be surrounded by a Classical colonnade surmounted by a quadriga, with Washington taking the reins in this Roman equestrian type.  But the late 1830s were not a good time to build fancy monuments, what with the giant Panic and Depression and everything.  In 1848 the cornerstone was fiiiiinally laid, but then there were all sorts of political troubles getting in the way of architecture projects.  Construction was suspended in 1854 after the monument reached a height of  150 feet.  In addition to war breaking out, there were more financial problems and political shenanigans and the project just pooped out until well after the Civil War.  For over two decades visitors to the capital city saw not a monument but a big, uninspiring stump.  Mills died in 1855 not knowing if it would ever be finished.  In 1876 construction finally got going in earnest again, and thankfully avoided the quick-finish options suggested by this guy Hoxie that would have been a creepy precursor to Stalinist architecture of the 1930s.  Instead, Mills’ Roman colonnade was dropped, the top of the obelisk made more pointy, and the monument finished with the topping-out at the ultimate height of just over 555 feet happening in December, 1884 as illustrated above (from Harper’s).  It was dedicated on February 21, 1885, and people were finally admitted inside in October, 1888.

Although it takes a super-ancient form (even Clio thinks the Egyptians are pretty oldey-timey), it was intended to be modern, so as to illustrate Washington’s foundation of a great nation, and was undeniably so, at least for a moment.  It was the tallest structure in the universe until the opening of the Eiffel Tower (no contest, mes amis: it’s 508 feet taller) in the following year.  Its aluminum tip was cast of what was, at the time, a very expensive and even luxurious, super-modern material.  However, that changed too, with the plummeting price of aluminum that has now made the material appropriate for use in lunch boxes.  The 100 oz. capstone, if rolled out really thin, would net as much aluminum foil in about seventeen rolls of Reynolds Wrap or, in other (more Washington-relevant) words, enough aluminum to wrap approximately 517 cherry pies.

Read more than you can imagine there is to know about the aluminum tip in this blog by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society