From the time of Louis XIV France had been unique in possessing a highly organized system of architectural education. Under the aegis of the Académie, students were prepared for professional practice in a way all but unknown elsewhere. To crown their formal training came the opportunity, determined by competition, for the ablest to spend several years of further study as pensionnaires in Rome. The revolutionary years of the 1790s disrupted temporarily the French pattern of architectural education and recurrent wars cut off access to Rome. The Empire, however, early re-established the pattern of higher professional education with only slight and nominal differences. From 1806 on, moreover, the competition projects for the Prix de Rome, including those from as far back as 1791, were handsomely published in a series of volumes.[[38]] Thus the whole international world of architecture could henceforth have ready access to the visual results of official French training in architecture, if not to the actual discipline of the Parisian ateliers.
Napoleon, as an ex-ordnance officer, felt more sympathy with engineers than with architects; hence he established a new École Polytechnique, where architecture was included in the curriculum along with various sciences and technics. J.-N.-L. Durand (1760-1834), the new school’s professor of architecture, published his Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique in two volumes in 1802-5, thus making a fairly complete presentation of the content of French architectural education generally available.[[39]] Recurrent issues of this work down to 1840, of which at least one appeared outside France—in Belgium—allowed this popular treatise to become a sort of bible of Romantic Classicism that retained international authority for a generation and more.
Durand was a pupil of Boullée; but both the text and the plates of his book indicate his capacity for synthesizing and systematizing the diverse strands of theory and practice that had developed in France in the previous forty years. Because of his temperament and background, and a fortiori because he was teaching not in an art academy but in a technical school, Durand is doubtless to be classed within his generation as a proponent of structural rationalism. But he was a much more eclectic one than Soufflot’s disciple Rondelet, from 1795 professor at the École Centrale des Travaux Publics and author of the major treatise on building construction of the period.[[40]] Durand’s lessons incorporated many other aspects of Romantic Classicism, from the pure Classical Revivalism of one wing of the academic world to an eclectic interest in Renaissance and even, like his master Boullée, in certain medieval modes; only the recondite symbolism of Ledoux is absent. In general, one feels in Durand’s case, as always with the second generation of an artistic movement, some loss of intensity at various points where the awkward edges of opposed sources of inspiration were clipped to allow their coherent codification.
After a theoretical introduction concerning the goal of architecture, its structural means, and the general principles to be derived therefrom, Durand deals as a convinced ‘constructor’ with various materials and their proper employment before treating of specific forms and their combination. Only in the second part of his work, concerned with ways of combining architectural elements, do the visual results of his theories become fully evident. There he presents in plan and in elevation various structural systems from trabeated colonnades of Greek and Roman inspiration to arcuated and vaulted forms of Renaissance or even round-arched medieval character. Among his specific examples, ‘vertical combinations’ of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century elements outnumber the strictly Classical paradigms (Figure [2]); whole plates, moreover, are given to schemes that are not only generically Italianate, but of Early Christian, Romanesque, or even Gothic, rather than Renaissance, inspiration. Common to most of his examples is the insistent repetition of elements, both horizontally and vertically, and most characteristic is his interest in the varied skylines that central and corner towers can provide, as also in the incorporation of voids in architectural compositions in the form of loggias and pergolas. More monumental façades fronted by temple porticoes are in a minority, although colonnades are frequent enough in his presentation of such specific features as porches, vestibules, halls, galleries, and central spaces. Here are to be found most of the detailed formulas—almost all derived from Boullée and from the Grand Prix projects of the previous decade—which the next generation of architects would follow again and again throughout most of the western world.
Figure 2. J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Vertical Combinations’ (from Précis des leçons, 1805)
In his second volume Durand turns from a consideration of architecture in terms of structural elements to a notably systematic presentation of buildings in terms of their varying functions. First he deals with urbanistic features, including not only bridges, streets, and squares, but also such supposedly essential elements of the ideal classicizing city as triumphal arches and tombs. A second section considers temples (not churches, it is amusing to note), palaces, treasuries, law courts, town halls, colleges, libraries, museums, observatories, lighthouses, markets, exchanges, custom houses, exhibition buildings, theatres, baths, hospitals, prisons, and barracks. Here were all the individual structures of the model Napoleonic city, of which Napoleon had time to build so few but of which the next decades in France and abroad were to see so many executed by Durand’s pupils and other emulators of his ideals.
For less representational edifices, from town halls and markets to prisons and barracks, Durand’s utilitarianism led him to substitute for colonnades and domes plain walls broken by ranges of arcuated openings, sometimes of quattrocento or Roman-aqueduct character but as often of vaguely medieval inspiration. For nearly a half century such paradigms were very frequently followed, not only in France but even more in other countries, as Classicism continued to grow more Romantic.
Nor were the designs for houses that Durand provided in the final section of his book entirely uninfluential.[[41]] However, there were fewer of these, and the inspiration of far more executed work of the next forty or fifty years can be traced to his paradigms for public monuments than to his prescriptions for private dwellings. Indeed, Romantic Classicism is a predominantly public style, and its utilitarianism is of the State rather than of the private individual. However, the opposing current of the Picturesque, reflected in Durand’s book only in his concern for the ‘employment of the objects of nature in the composition of edifices’ (by which he meant hardly more than Italianate fountains and even more Italianate vine-hung loggias), provided amply for the individual (see Chapter [6]).
It might seem natural to continue from this discussion of Durand’s treatise with some account of the executed architecture of France during the final years of the Empire after 1810, under the last Bourbons, and under Louis Philippe. Actually, however, the most concrete examples of Durand’s influence, and certainly the finest Durandesque monuments, are to be found not in France but in Germany and Denmark.