The fact that the nineteenth century began with much of Europe under the hegemony of a French Empire does not quite justify calling the particular phase of Romantic Classicism with which the nineteenth century opens Empire, although this is frequently done in most European countries. Yet the prestige of Napoleon’s rule, and indeed its actual extent, ensured around 1800 the continuance of that French leadership in architecture which had started a century earlier under Louis XIV. Beyond the boundaries of Napoleon’s realm and the lands of his nominees and his allies, moreover, French émigrés carried the new architectural ideas of the last years of the monarchy—for many of them were revolutionaries in the arts, although like Ledoux politically unacceptable to the leaders of the Revolution in France. Even in the homeland of Napoleon’s principal opponents, the English, the prestige of French taste, high in the eighties, hardly declined with the Napoleonic wars. The mature Romantic Classicism of England in the last decade of the old century and the first of the new is certainly full of French ideas, even though it is not always clear exactly how they were transmitted across the Channel in war-time.
If Romantic Classicism, the nearly universal style with which nineteenth-century architecture began, was predominantly French in origin and in its continuing ideals and standards, the same decades that saw it reach maturity also saw the rise of another major movement in the arts that was definitely English. The ‘Picturesque’, a critical concept that had been increasing in authority for two generations in England, received the dignity of a capital P in the 1790s. The term Romantic Classicism is a twentieth-century historian’s invention, attempting by its own contradictoriness to express the ambiguity of the dominant mode of this period in the arts; the term Picturesque, on the other hand, was most widely used and the concept most thoroughly examined just before and just after 1800 (see Chapters [1] and [6]).
To the twentieth century, on the whole, the aesthetic standards of Romantic Classicism—or perhaps one should rather say the visual results—have been widely acceptable. The results of the application of Picturesque principles in architecture, on the other hand, have not been so generally admired; indeed, until lately the more clearly and unmistakably buildings realized Picturesque ideals, the less was usually the esteem in which they were held by posterity. On the whole, in architecture if not in landscape design, the twentieth century has preferred to see the manifestations of the Picturesque around 1800 as aberrations from a norm considered primarily to have been a ‘Classical Revival’. As the adjectival aspect of the term Romantic Classicism makes evident, however, the Classicism of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was not at all the same as that of the High Renaissance, nor even that of the Academic Reaction of the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. Romantic Classicism aimed not so much towards the ‘Beautiful’, in the sense of Aristotle and the eighteenth-century aestheticians, as towards what had been distinguished by Edmund Burke in 1756 as the ‘Sublime’.
Posterity has admired in the production of the first decades of the nineteenth century a homogeneity of style which is in fact even more illusory than that of earlier periods. Horrified by the chaos of later nineteenth-century eclecticism, two twentieth-century have praised architects and patrons of the years before and after 1800 for a consistency that was by no means really theirs. In some ways, and not unimportant ways, the history of architecture within the period covered by this volume seems to come full circle so that the Austrian art historian Emil Kaufmann could in 1933 write a book entitled Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. Kaufmann did not live quite long enough to realize how far from the spheres and cubes of the Ledolcian ideal the revolutionary twentieth-century architect would move in these last years (see Chapter [23]). Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp, completed in 1955 after Kaufmann’s death, seems more in accord with extreme eighteenth-century illustrations of the Picturesque than with characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism (Plate [167]). Yet in the early works of the American Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1890s and those of the German Mies van der Rohe twenty years later a filiation to early nineteenth-century Classicism can be readily traced; that tradition informed almost the entire production of the French Perret, a good deal of that of the German Behrens, and even some of the best late work of the Austrian Wagner (see Chapters [18]-[21]).
Forgetting for the moment the Picturesque, one may profitably set down here some of the characteristics that the aspirations and the achievements of the architects of 1800 share, or seem to share, with those of the architects of over a century later. The preference for simple geometrical forms and for smooth, plain surfaces is common to both, though the earlier men aimed at effects of unbroken mass and the later ones rather at an expression of hollow volume. The protestations of devotion to the ‘functional’ are similar, if as frequently sophistical in the one case as in the other. The preferred isolation of buildings in space is as evident in the ubiquitous temples of the early nineteenth century as in the towering slabs of the mid twentieth. Monochromy and even monotony in the use of homogeneous wall-surfacing materials and the avoidance of detail in relief is balanced in both periods by an emphasis on direct structural expression, whether the structure be the posts and lintels of a masonry colonnade or the steel or ferro-concrete members of a continuous space-cage. Finally, impersonality and, perhaps even more notably, ‘internationality’ of expression provided around 1800 a universalized sense of period rather than the flavours of particular nations or regions, just as they have done in the last forty years.
The full flood of Romantic Classicism came late, having been dammed so long by the political and economic turmoil of the last years of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth; it also continued late, in some areas even beyond 1850. But dissatisfaction and revolt also started early; it is not a unique stylistic paradox that the greatest masters of Romantic Classicism were often those who were also most ready to explore the alternative possibilities of the Picturesque (see Chapter [6]). The architectural production of the first half of the nineteenth century cannot therefore be presented with any clarity in a single chronological sequence. Parallel architectural events, even strictly contemporary works by the same architect, must be set in their proper places in at least two different sequences of development.
The building production of the early decades of the century already divides only too easily under various stylistic headings. A Greek Revival, a Gothic Revival, etc., have fact, these and other ‘revivals’ were but aspects either of the dominant Romantic Classical tide or of the Picturesque countercurrent (see Chapters [1]-[5] and Chapter [6], respectively). Only the story of the increasing exploitation of new materials, notably iron and glass, reaching some sort of a culmination around 1850, lay outside, though never quite isolated from, the realm of the revivalistic modes (see Chapter [7]).
PART ONE
1800-1850