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 present Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay was built in 1846-56 by
Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856), who had completed in 1821-35 his master
Bonnard’s earlier Ministry near by that was begun for Napoleon in 1814.
Superimposed arch orders produce a rich and rather Venetian version of
the Renaissance Revival not unrelated to the treatment of the somewhat
exceptional Empire building on which he had worked. Duc began to plan
the restoration and enlargement of the Palace of Justice in Paris as
early as 1840, but the handsomest and most conspicuous portions of this
elaborate complex date from the Second Empire. J.-F. Duban (1797-1870)
started the restoration of the old Louvre, over which a hot controversy
soon ensued, in 1848; the New Louvre, begun by Visconti in 1852 and
carried forward after his death in 1853 by Lefuel, would be the prime
monument of the succeeding period (see Chapter 8). Duban’s capacities in
this period—he did his best work rather later (Plate 72B)—are better
appreciated in the building for the École des Beaux Arts he completed in
1838 and in the elegant Early Italian Renaissance design of the Hôtel de
Pourtalès of 1836 in the Rue Tronchet, perhaps the finest Paris mansion
of its day.
However, it was not with such _hôtels particuliers_ but with _maisons de
rapport_, that is, blocks of flats, that the streets of Paris, like
those of Berlin and Vienna, were mostly built up in these decades.
Earlier ones, such as those in the Place de la Bourse, are very
carefully composed yet almost devoid of prominent architectural features
(Plate 27C). In the later thirties and above all the forties, however,
the detail grew richer and more eclectic, while the façades were in
general much less neatly composed. Not only were rich Italian or French
Renaissance features popular but exotic oriental ornament was more than
occasionally used. The planning became more complex and elastic also;
but both in exterior design and in interior organization the type
remained firmly rooted in late-eighteenth-century tradition. The Paris
streets of the first half of the nineteenth century have a notable
consistency of scale and character, since the cornice lines, and even
the shapes of the high roofs, were controlled by a well-enforced
building code and their eclecticism of style is little more than a
matter of detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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