Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
The French did not, like the Germans, turn to the use of tawny brick and
terracotta in the second quarter of the century; but the interest of
Hittorff and his generation in applied polychromy relates their work a
little to that of the Romantic colourists in painting.[63] Unfortunately
almost none of this polychromy remains visible now; and so the shift
away from the monochromy that is characteristic everywhere of Romantic
Classicism down to this period is less evident in France than in other
countries.
Especially fine is the open timber roof of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul,
although in fact only a part of the actual construction is exposed;
while the fact that the colonnaded apse is wide enough to include the
inner aisles as well as the nave gives a quite unprecedented spatial
interest to the east end. Moreover, in this interior Hittorff achieved a
rich warmth of tone quite different from the coldness of Godde’s and
Molinos’s churches of the twenties. His Cirque des Champs Élysées of
1839-41 and Cirque d’Hiver of 1852 were even more brilliantly
polychromatic both inside and out. But the most conspicuous extant works
of Hittorff, the Gare du Nord of 1861-5, the Second Empire façades
surrounding the Place de l’Étoile, and the decoration of the Place de la
Concorde and the Champs Élysées with fountains and other features under
the July Monarchy, provide today little evidence[64] of this aspect of
his talent once so notable to contemporaries at home and abroad.
Especially happy is the siting of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the upper
side of the new polygonal Place Charles X (now Place Lafayette), of
which the other sides were filled in the twenties with consonant houses
by A.-F.-R. Leclerc (1785-1853),[65] a pupil of both Durand and Percier,
and A.-J. Pellechet (1789-1871). Less characteristic of Romantic
Classical urbanism than the squares and streets of Karlsruhe and Munich,
this nevertheless well illustrates the dignity and the regularity of the
houses then rising in the new quarters of Paris. The very considerable
new quarter in Mulhouse, which was laid out and built up in 1826-8 by
J.-G. Stotz (1799-?), a pupil of Leclerc, and A.-J.-F. Fries (1800-59),
a pupil of Huyot, is more properly comparable with Karlsruhe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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