CHAPTER 8 - Notes
[179]. A notably extreme early example is Visconti’s Fontaine Molière of 1841-4 in the Rue de Richelieu in Paris.
[180]. Here Visconti’s taste also proves to have been premonitory. His project of 1833 for a library already had a bulbous roof over the central pavilion; while that of 1849 for the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Rue de Richelieu had bold engaged orders on the central pavilion and a tall straight-sided mansard as well.
[181]. See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Second Empire “avant la lettre”’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, XIII (1953), 115-30. The existence of French analogues in the forties was insufficiently stressed there, however.
[182]. See Kramer, E. W., ‘Detlef Lienau, an Architect of the Brown Decades’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV (1955), 18-25. Lienau was born in Schleswig-Holstein, then Danish, but received his early education in Germany. For a still earlier mansard than Lienau’s, see Dallett, J. F. ‘John Notman’s Mansard, 1848’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 81.
[183]. See Aulanier, C., Le Nouveau Louvre de Napoleon III, Paris [1953], and Hautecoeur, L. Histoire du Louvre, Paris [n.d.]
[184]. See Pinkney, D. H., Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, Princeton, N.J., 1958. Work began on the extension of the Rue de Rivoli in 1851; but it was only in 1853 that the Emperor found in G.-E. Haussmann (1809-91), whom he made Prefect of the Seine and later a baron, an adequate collaborator and executant for his tremendous urbanistic programme.
[185]. A tour which can be taken vicariously is provided in a splendid set of lithographs of the period, Paris dans sa splendeur; from this Plates 19 and 55B are taken.
[186]. The degree of control exercised by public authority over the façades varied. For the extension of the Rue de Rivoli, continuation of Percier & Fontaine’s original design was required; and for the Place de l’Étoile and the Place de l’Opéra comprehensive designs established in advance were enforced (see below). Elsewhere only the height of the cornice line and the silhouette of the mansard were ordinarily standardized by regulation.
[187]. Built in 1855 as the Hôtel des Chemins de Fer, but now the Hôtel du Louvre, and the work of Hittorff, Rohault de Fleury, Armand, and Pellechet. Hittorff and Rohault were also collaborating on the houses surrounding the Place de l’Étoile at this time. T. L. Donaldson, reporting on the new hotel at the Royal Institute of British Architects on 22 June 1855, remarked: ‘The roof plays an important part in the design ... much of the majesty of French buildings is derived from these lofty roofs.’ Donaldson supervised the erection of the Hope house, and had thus played a personal part in the introduction of the French mansard into England six years earlier.
[188]. It is curious that there should be uncertainty about the authorship of a complex so central to the building activity of its era. The Grand Hotel which occupies the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens to the left of the Opéra was by the team responsible for the Hôtel des Chemins de Fer at the other end of the avenue (see Note [[187]]). Pinkney in Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, the latest to discuss the subject, gives credit for all the façades around the Place de l’Opéra to Rohault; Hautecoeur assigns the rounded pavilions opposite the front of the Opéra to Blondel and mentions no other architect. Whoever was responsible, Garnier felt they were much too tall and confining for his Opéra.
[189]. See Garnier, J.-L.-C., Le nouvel Opéra de Paris, 2 vols text and 6 vols plates, Paris, 1875-81.
[190]. By this time Viollet-le-Duc was far more ‘Victorian’ than Garnier, yet his secular work had become so eclectic and even original in detail as hardly any longer to be Neo-Gothic at all (see Chapter [11].
[191]. See Daly, C., and Davioud, G.-J.-A., Les théâtres de la Place du Châtelet, Paris, 1860.
[192]. See Notice du Palais de Longchamps à Marseille, Marseilles, 1872.
[193]. See Daly, C., L’Architecture privée au XIXe siècle ... sous Napoléon III; nouvelles maisons de Paris et des environs, 3 vols, Paris, 1864; Calliat, V., Parallèle des nouvelles maisons de Paris, vol. II, Paris, 1864; Adam, Leveil, and LeBlanc, Recueil des maisons les plus remarquables, Paris, 1858; and Maisons les plus remarquables de Paris, Paris, 1870. César Daly, as editor of the Revue de l’architecture, also determined the character of the material that periodical offered in this period.
[194]. It is awkward that the long career of Viollet-le-Duc, like that of Semper, does not fall largely within any single chapter of this book. Active from the forties until the seventies, leading restorer of medieval monuments of his age in France, leading medieval archaeologist of Europe, controversial reformer of French architectural education (at least in posse), author of influential critical books, he was the inspirer—by his writings rather than his executed work—of a later generation of architectural innovators abroad perhaps even more notably than at home. His failure to conform to the normal pattern of architectural life that usually confines a particular man’s significant activity within some one phase of architectural development—such as, on the whole, each chapter of this book deals with—makes it necessary to present his career in piecemeal fashion. It is partly covered in Chapter 6, with a few further mentions in this chapter, and—more significantly—in Chapter [11] in this Part and Chapter [16] at the beginning of Part Three. It is worth noting that Viollet-le-Duc is the only architect who enters this book in each of its three parts, even though it is only as an influence, not an executant, that he comes into the last part.
[195]. And some contemporaries were ready to say Sicilian! It was started—or at least commissioned—some years before the first volume of the great treatise on Syrian architecture appeared: Vogüé, C.-J.-M. de, Syrie Centrale, 2 vols, Paris, 1865-77. But Vaudremer must have seen the drawings of Kalat Seman published by Duthuit in the Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment, 1864, No. 7, 79.
[196]. See Daumet, H., Notice sur M. Abadie, Paris, 1886. It is relevant that Abadie became Diocesan Architect of Périgueux in 1874, the same year he began the Sacré-Cœur, the competition for which he had won two years earlier.
[197]. For characteristic French prize projects that were admired and emulated abroad, see Les grands prix de Rome d’architecture de 1850-1900, Paris [n.d.]
[198]. For the Massachusetts institution, see Ware, W. R., An Outline of a Course of Architectural Instruction, Boston, 1866; for Columbia, see idem, ‘The Instruction in Architecture at the School of Mines’, School of Mines Quarterly, X (1888), 28-43.
[199]. Yet one of the boldest modern architects of Latin America, Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) of Venezuela, was educated at the École des Beaux-Arts itself; and most of the other modern architects in these countries—those over forty at least—were trained in the local Escuelas de Bellas Artes based on the Paris original.
[200]. The most conspicuous exception, dominating the whole city, is the Mole Antonelliana. This extraordinary edifice, begun by Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1880) in 1863, more than rivals his very tall earlier dome on San Gaudenzio in Novara, designed in 1840. Never really completed, the construction of the Mole continued intermittently down to Antonelli’s death. By its great height and in some of the technicalities of its construction it rivals the Eiffel Tower and the early American skyscrapers which are posterior to it by several decades. Yet Antonelli arrived at no coherent expression of his structural innovations and, to judge from the successive purposes for which the structure has been intended to serve or has served, no real capacity to provide a functionally viable building. On the whole, as its present name implies, this is a monument chiefly to its designer’s megalomania.
[201]. See Reed, H. H., ‘Rome: The Third Sack’, Architectural Review, CVII (1950), 91-110.
[202]. The third prominent edifice, surprisingly enough, is High Victorian Gothic. St Paul’s, the American church, is by the English architect G. E. Street, and its curious relation to the characteristic academic blocks by Koch and his contemporaries can be appreciated on Plate [100] (see Chapter [11]).
[203]. See Acciaresi, P., Giuseppe Sacconi e l’opera sua massima, Rome, 1911.
[204]. The best-maintained later equivalent in northern Europe is probably the Passage, as it is called, in The Hague. Built in 1882-5, this hardly rivals the Galleria Mazzini in Genoa in length and breadth, much less Mengoni’s. There are many other examples, some of them considerably later, but few are in good condition today, and none have the scale of the three principal Italian examples. For earlier French examples, see Chapter [3].