Percier and Fontaine are
trained in the ancien régime. Their life will be a life spent across
one of the most tumultuous periods, not only in French history,
but I think in modern history with the transition across the revolution
and then the successive regimes, depending on how you want to count. If you count Napoleon's one hundred days
in the first and second restoration, they probably lived through eight or
nine radical changes of government. But to put this against the backdrop of
the incredibly tumultuous era through which they lived and how they figured
out how to completely transform what they thought was their destiny, we'll see in
a moment, to be architects to the crown, to be architects of great public buildings
and instead to be architects to a private clientele taken up at a certain
moment by a flirtatious but very capricious future self-appointed emperor. So here they are these two friends Percier
and Fontaine in a caricature before The Louvre, standing, as you can see on a- in
front of some equipment. We're not quite sure if it's the wrecking
equipment that's creating some room in order to view the great facade of
Claude Perrault or if it's construction material for what they are finally going
to do at The Louvre. As you can see, the work site is designated as the museum. So Percier and Fontaine really are the
first crafters of one of the first modern museums of modern history, the transformation of The Louvre
palace into The Louvre museum. A project begun actually
under Louis the 16th, given a kind of imprimatur of the
revolution and opened very triumphantly by Napoleon. They would be absolutely indistinguishable
in many ways or in dissociable for their entire careers. In age different by only two years. Fontaine the elder born in 1762.
You see him here, there on the left. And of course he is engraved because it
is he who will enter into the Academy, who will become a much more the trusted
sidekick of numerous rulers through- through radical changes of- of French
government from a middle class family. To the North of Paris, although he recounts in his
wonderful diary from his youth, how he stole away from the
village of L'Isle-Adam, where he was born to walk to Paris in
order to see the work of the students at the Academy of architecture because
he aspired to be an architect, but he could only be
away for about 48 hours. So he snuck to Paris in his teens
for the first time to see the whole infrastructure of becoming an architect.
Later on we'll see him there in moment. He would encounter the two years younger
Charles Percier born in 1764 from a working class family. So Percier is a extraordinary
story because he comes from an a, a working class family who will begin his
education at what was called the École Gratuites Royale de Dessin, which meant that these was a school that
was free founded by the crown in the middle of the 18th century to really, to train the draftsmen and the workers
in the production of furniture. And this was very much the career that
the young working class Percier was destined for. Although he was
such an extraordinary draftsman, he managed to do a very unusual thing
and to work his way from the Royal school of free drawing, which was
a school really for 12, 13, 14 year olds who would just
enter in to the woodworking, furniture-making professions into the
École des Beaux Arts and to become an architect and actually to hang out with
no one less than Napoleon and Josephine. This is Percier once he
has made that transition, I want now to put these two friends-
we're going- if you want to go pay homage to them today, the thing to do is
to take a trip to Père Lachaise. You can follow the signs initially for
Jimmy Hendrix, but before you get there, take a little left and you will find the
tomb of three architects who had signed a pact, when they were all at
the French Academy in Rome. We'll get them to Rome in just
a moment. Percier and Fontaine. And the third of this trio, a man
named Bernier to do three things, that they would study
the antiquities together, that they would form a lifetime
friendship and association, and then they would be buried together. And so the tomb that was designed for
the three of them and where the three of them rest today in the Père
Lachaise was designed by Percier, is of kind of fulfillment of this
romantic friendship and professional association. So that's a pilgrimage that you can
make on your next trip to Paris. Very recondite to get back to your hotel
at night and say you've been to see the grave of Percier, Fontaine, and
Bernier. And then of course, the person you're having dinner will
say "Who was Bernier?" And you'll say, "You don't know?" I don't have much
Bernier here for you because Bernier drops out when it comes time to form a
stock company around the publications. Percier and Fontaine will emerge from
the system of the academic prizes. And I want here to show you the extent
to which they are prepared for a career that they will not have in quite the
ways that they could imagine it in what turned out to be the closing moments of
the ancien régime of the reign of Louis the 16th. Here is, as you can see, this drawing is too big to photograph by
a mere mortal like Jean Phillipe or me. This is a a drawing probably the size
of your largest tablecloth for a a menagerie for a kind of royal zoo sort
of imagination of recrafting part of the palace of Versailles
for the royal animals. It goes to show the types of projects
that were given to the students. Now we have to imagine in 1783
that Percier is 19 years old. So this is a drawing done by a 19 year
old hoping to win the Grand Prix and be sent at the crown and the Academy's
expense to Rome to refine his skills as as an architect. As you can see, the aim was not only to learn the
principles of competition- composition, but also the principles of of
rendering at the centerpiece of it. This is that circular building that you
see here was a kind of what would you call it? It was really an arena
for the animals to perform tricks. Kind of like a horse riding place or
other animals from the menagerie could be brought in to this Rome
interiorized Roman Colosseum. But this was the set of drawings that
would win Percier the Grand Prix de Rome which he took coming out of the
studio of a very important architect, Antoine François Pierre, where
he had first met Fontaine. The next year Fontaine entered the Grand
Prix and came up with this project: an absolutely extraordinary project for
a sepulcher monument to the sovereigns of a great grand empire. So here we are in 1785. Of course, we see immediately four years
before the revolution, we think, what kind of fantasy is this guy into? Doesn't he know it's
all over in four years. No one knew that in 1785. This drawing is sometimes commented
upon as a total fantasy project, as though it was to glorify the French
monarchy at a time when it was in deep trouble by imagining a Royal Memorial landscape
cemetery. But it is also, I think important to know that one of
the burning issues of the day was if the problems of a disease in the French
capital in Paris might partly be solved by abandoning the habit of burying people
in church graveyards and creating cemeteries outside the city. So this project is actually related to
one of the central urban planning debates of the, of the day, even if it takes it to an
absolutely almost pre-Roman fantasy. But one of the most interesting things
here is that in this absolutely dramatic drawing of pure forms of architecture, this conic form for the central
mausoleum for the royal family, surrounded by a series of smaller cones. This absolutely sublime, uninterrupted colonnade of vast scale, but also the depiction of it under a
clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning these atmospheric effects, but also the notion that the forms of
architecture might be formed as much by a knowledge of classical architecture as
they would be by the effects of nature, of light, of environment on creating form, as this of course 150 years before
Corbusier writes that architecture is the play of volumes in light and shade. All of this got Fontaine into
an enormous amount of trouble. Although the competition jury recognized
that this was really the finest project, they were afraid that
Fontaine's drawing skills were, so violated the dry norms of the Academy
that to reward his genius would send at best bad sign. This is interesting because quite clearly
the inspiration comes from one of the academicians themselves from Étienne-Louis
Boullée and his private projects here imagining a sepulcher monument, a cenotaph for Newton at
exactly the same moment. So the Academy was in a very strange
position because perhaps one of its most advanced and experimental teacher masters
was trying in private to create an abstract architecture of pure form, of a symbolic communication
through abstraction, rather than even through the classical
orders that they were reluctant that the students adhere to.
Interestingly, Percier said, well, if you're not going to give the
prize to my best chum Fontaine, I will split my prize with him and he
will walk to Rome and we will split it together. So determined
where they to succeed. But the following year
Fontaine was successful and
the two of them were able to join together. This was
Percier's winning project 1786. And it takes up this notion of the study
of antiquity to submit it to modern uses. This is a project to
house the academies of France. So here the Academy is going to judge a
students over in 1786 that makes Percier 22 years old, a 22 year old
homework assignment, if you will, to redesign the house of the Academy
who's judging the competition's a little, you know, like end of architecture school, please redesign this
school and we'll just, the Dean will decide whether
you get a prize or not. So here is Percier redesigning
a project for the Academies. As you can see, he imagines a great
meeting hall in the form of a Pantheon. What more would the academicians want
than to think that they should take the place of the Roman forum of all
the gods. And then in the side, a series of meeting chambers
and courtyards for the
various academies of France. There were four academies, so there were four sides to
this competition- composition, but also the notion of a ability
not only to plan a complex program , a complex brief into a very clear pattern
that has an absolute abstract beauty just as a plan as diagram, but also a gradation of spaces as one
approach that assembly that would take over the idea of procession in the
Royal palace into the idea of a public building. So this in the end was what the students
were being taught by the end of the 18th century in the French Academy. How to take all of the lessons of
classical antiquity and design public buildings that would
elevate public functions, buildings in the city to the level of
something that had previously held for the crown, for private residences, for palaces into the new
problems of public buildings. So this is the moment when the center
of Paris is being transformed by the addition of the great
building for the Royal mint, which was also the Academy of
metallurgy; of the school of medicine; of the church of Sainte Genviève on
the left bank and of the theater of the Odéon. So this is a time when Paris,
and you can still see them today, is being restructured by the idea
of a grand public architecture. And all of this is what is going to be
the product of those who win the Grand Prix de Rome. So think of it, of all of the students who are studying
architecture, in any given year, only one will get the Grand Prix. So there is an architect who is designated
to go and refine his talents because women don't come to the Êcole des Beaux
Arts until the very end of the 19th century. And to go to Rome in order to
refine talents and to have a, a more profound knowledge
of the models of antiquity, but also with the near guarantee that
the Grand Prix would bring with it important commissions. When one came home. This was designating the elite of
architectural practice in in France. There the finished elevations of Percier
and you can see the extent to which he is in fact indebted to a project, a fantasy project by his mentor, one of his mentors Boullée for
the design of a museum in 1783. This is also important because it tells
us that the period of the enlightenment and the reign of Louis the 16th, we're thinking about public functions
such as the creation of a public museum even before the revolutionary
transformation of The
Louvre palace into a modern museum. So five years in Rome, that's what you get if you
get the Grand Prix de Rome. Even the American Academy
today only gives you one. So this was really quite
a a wonderful boondoggle. If you are looking into the details
of some of the plates of one of their publications that's brought together in
this complete published works of Percier and Fontaine, you will find a
self portrait of Percier here, a drawing in the gardens
of the Villa Albani. The Ville Albani itself
was a very important site. If any of you know the Ville Albani, this is where Winckelmann wrote
the history of ancient art. This is where the Cardinal Albani
created one of the great 18th century collections of antiquities and fragments
and began to try to compose them into a history of art. We might even say that it was at the
Villa Albani that the modern discipline of the history of art was born. And
so it also shows us that this, rather a guy from a modest family in
Paris had through the Royal Academy of architecture gained, entry into one of the most difficult
tickets of admission to visit the private gardens and Villa Villa of
Albani and even to be able, it's almost impossible even
today to visit it, to record it, to draw the antique fragments that had
been brought there into an extraordinary picturesque as garden situation. The, I find this print incredibly
interesting and I think the book is very interesting in allowing you to peruse
these prints and think about challenges to a certain number of received
ways that we recount history. Later on we'll see some images, few minutes of the famous Malmaison
that Percier and Fontaine created, famous also for its picturesque gardens, which are always said to be
inspired by English gardens. But here you can see the young Percier
drawing in one of the great picturesque gardens of 18th century Rome. His official assignment was to draw so
carefully that he would be able to create an absolutely to the, I shouldn't say millimeter because
we're going to see in a moment, millimeters didn't exist when he
created these drawings in 1788. He paid himself to erect a scaffolding
to get up close and personal with Trajan's column and to record and measure
every inch of its surface to send back to Paris as proof that he was in fact
not just hanging out and drinking and going on picnics, but was working hard to
create archeological evidence
that could be used for modern buildings, but also that could be deployed
in what he did at night, was to, which was to create these
absolutely fine wash drawings. So here in elevation some of the
details of the features of the capital. But what is a particular
interest I think to Percier here is the relationship between
Roman engineering and the structure in that wonderful section of how the
interior staircase rises through Trajan's column. And of course, as you all know, the spiral of the decoration
recounts the defeat of the Dacians, the modern day Romanians
bringing of them into the empire. So this was an Imperial monument and
being studied in what turns out to be the late monarchy, but also a fascination with the role of
relief at a larger scale up close to the spectator as a Percier studies all of
that as something that might have use for his future work as well as the the lettering style of the ancient Romans
that they will also want to adapt for modern use. Very poignant then that he has created
what was immediately recognized as one of the finest achievements of the new
demand that the students be collectively creating large scale restoration drawings
of the Roman antiquities for the use of modern France. So this translation from studying
antiquity to creating modernity was at the very heart of the program of
the Academy of architecture, was at the heart of the investment in
these young men in sending them to the French Academy in Rome for five years. But how poignant that it should be in
1788 because of course, one year later, everything is going to change. It's
not the only thing that they saw. They hung out in Piranesi's shop,
bought draw, prints from him. Piranesi's shop was actually next to the
French Academy in Rome. In the Corso, they saw one of the rare works of Piranesi
here working for the Knights of Malta in which one could think about
the relationship of a sculpture, decoration and iconography, strange iconography in
the case of Piranesi, to the creation of public
space and to public squares. But also if one delves into
the more private notebooks, it becomes clear that
Percier and Fontaine as well. Although here I'm showing you
freer sketches by Percier. This is of the the Renaissance facade
of the Palazzo Venezia that very important, early pilastered and arcaded two
story loges still exists today, although the rest of
the context has changed. But he's interested in the
picturesque, the irregular. And notice to the way that he records
simultaneously a section with a view into the interior and an elevation in
one rather free washed drawing. Or these which are incredibly important
because he studies these buildings that are not going to enter in. No
one's studied this in school, vernacular buildings, the
outbuildings, the farm buildings. He's as interested in the
vernacular of countryside. He's as interested in a building that
signals the return of ancient Roman architecture to Renaissance Rome in that
high style logia as he is in the use of the classical language of architecture
in a completely anonymous subsidiary building of partially of brick. So many, many drawings I could show you here is
Fontaine as well doing views of Rome. So we mustn't imagine it was only the
antique monuments nor that it was even only the high style monuments
because here is Fontaine recording, a view of the picturesque ensamble of
the early Christian Church of San Lorenzo outside the walls, all of this, 1776, 86, 87, 88. And of course, the revolution in 1789,
the events from Paris. Both Percier and Fontaine in fact will
miss the dramatic events of 1789 they are not present when this happens. The taking of the Bastille
prison on the 14th of July, 1789, even though only something like 14
prisoners in this debtor's prison were in fact released. Maybe we need a debtor's prison-
were released from the Bastille, it was a a great symbol of tyranny. And of course they didn't see this. They don't return from Rome
either of them until 1791. So they know most of what's going on. They watched the absolute evaporation
and erosion of their career perspectives from afar. They're not going to work
for the King. By the time they get back, there's even discussion that the King
might not make it a year after they get back. The King is beheaded. So it's not a good moment to take the
knowledge that you had in school and hope for a job. Everything is changing. Nothing is going to be left the same. I like to put these
together because of course, classic relations were changing
with the idea of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité or else death. But also time and space were
going to be changed by everything. Nothing is the same by the time they
get back. The calendar has been changed. It's no longer going to be 1791.
It's going to be the year one. Time starts over by numbering time from
the beginning of the French Republic. The idea of the French provinces with all
of their aristocratic connections were to be done away with instead the France
was going to be divided up rationally to create the new departments and
dissociate people from their old habits, from honor to aristocrats
and the like. Unfortunately, as you can see in this
drawing, which I love, which is a project for trying to create
89 departments commemorating 1789 was that the new invention of grid paper and
the actual outline of the map of France don't really go together that well. So you'd actually get 89 perfectly square departments out of the.
And then the meter, even the way space is measured,
the basic tool of the architect, the basic tool of designing,
of putting together a building, of composing was going to be changed
by the end of the decade with the introduction of the metric system. So just to give you a sense of
those radical changes interestingly, not everything was immediately going to
be a declaration of the new because in the end, how would one create
new art forms, new expressions, new forms of architecture, tabula rasa for a society that
was still hesitating. Louis, the 16th is still King, but what
is going to be the relationship? Will there be a constitution?
How is all of that going to work? And I like to show these because this is
a one of the last recorded plans of the Bastille prison. There is a folk image of the Sans-culottes
the revolutionaries dismantling the Bastille. But what did they do with it? They immediately carve each one of those
stones into a replica of the Bastille for sale as souvenirs, and 89 of them are sent
to the departmental headquarters for each
of the new departments. So the whole debate that they come
back to on what is the formal language, what will an architecture and an
art of the revolution look like? Will it have references
to classical antiquity? Will it emerge with the past? They miss the first great festival held
for the festival Federation held on the Champ de Mars, the area in
front of the École Militaire, still there as the Champ de Mars, which of course is a reference
to the Roman war field, the field for military exercises. But that field for military exercises
transformed into an instantaneous amphitheater for performances
of new rituals of Federation
and of the connection of all French, one to another, as all of the people who attend the
festival can come into these bleachers and look at one another. So
the theatrics, the staging, the pageantry of the King
taken over to Republican uses. I think this is going to be very important
for us because one thing that I want to emphasize is the extent
to which Percier and Fontaine
are going to become the pageant makers for the new reality and
ultimately the great pageant makers for Napoleon with his rise through the
consulate at the end-of the end of the revolutionary decade. And finally in 1804
his declaration of himself as emperor. So another view of this festival,
the Federation that they missed. A couple of other things that I
think are too frequently forgotten. I was a student in Paris at the time of
the bicentennial, the French revolution, and I quickly got, went out to buy my one volume paperback
dictionary of the revolution and turned immediately to the entry
architecture. Two sentences. It says, one knows in periods of political trouble
that there are no opportunities for architects and therefore there
is no revolutionary architecture. This is so unbelievably, completely false because in fact
what happened in the 1790s was the liberalization of all
sorts of regulations. And also we're going to see one of the
biggest land transfers ever to take place in the history of France. So the liberalization of who
could open and run a theater. So this is the Théâtre Feydau,
one of countless theaters, place for stage designers, a place where architects can become
instant creators of a scenery. So the Théâtre Feydau now gone in 17, directed in 1791 survived for
about 30 years, I believe, but one of many new theater buildings
that emerge during the revolutionary decade. Another view of it. But what
I want to underscore about this, and if you go looking for its site, you can find the surroundings
for this Théâtre Feydau. The Théâtre Feydau was taking advantage
of land that was sold from a confiscated ecclesiastical property of a monastery
and it was part of a real estate operation. So this is kind of
like a Cineplex. So, you know, somebody builds a cinema in order to bring people at night to
buy clothes they don't need in a mall in New Jersey. This is the
beginning of that idea. So you see that the theater
anchors a street of shops, which you see here as the street
of columns on the far left there. And there you see, it also provides a slip entry
into the theater itself. It's the very elegant
detailing of the theater. Percier and Fontaine are not
back in Paris at this point. So even the Percier and Fontaine
style we need in the next stage of contextualizing it to think of in
relationship to a radical change of conditions. This is a drawing by the young
Prussian architect Friedrich Gilly, the later the teacher of Schinkel of the, the street of columns Rue de Colonnes, which is adjacent to the theater
and still survives to this day. And it is probably the first organized
form of building apartment houses with shops below and creating an image of
the street has a Roman colonnated or arcaded urbanism, but an urbanism built by
real estate speculation. So the other thing that we
have to see here is here, these guys who go to Rome in order to
become royal architects who come back to a situation of one of the great real
estate speculative booms going on. Why? Because the property of the emigrated
aristocrats and of the church has been expropriated as national goods and sold
off in order to pay for what is going on and this absolutely extraordinary
new language of architecture, very abstract by inscribing in stone. Even one of the last projects of Ledoux
who will end up in prison about a year later was this series of speculative
houses called the Hosten Houses in what is today the ninth arrondissement near
the church Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in which he tried to create a kind
of high density English garden city, can see this kind of garden apartment
with an English picturesque garden. Very successful, although it did not
survive for more than about 30 years. So Percier and Fontaine come back with
all of this knowledge and what did they begin immediately to do? Not
to draw really great buildings, but to create an incredible vocabulary
for essentials for decoration. They understand that not
only is speculation going on, but the buildings are
being subdivided. I mean, think of the great apartment houses
in New York that are later chopped up. This is what's going on in Paris, great hôtel are being cut
down into smaller spaces. There is like any young
architect in New York, much more work to be had renovating
interiors than designing exteriors. This is the new reality for which Percier
and Fontaine seek largely through the first book that's included in the volume
back there with these extraordinary collages of everything
they have seen in Rome, but put together now as
absolutely seductive images
rather than as designs to be copied. And along with it, these reminiscences of a very picturesque
encounter with the Roman countryside and with fragments and
scholia of Roman antiquity, because it is also a moment
when the suburbs of Paris
are emerging as a place to build secondary residencies. In fact, the revolution is like almost all
moments of economic insecurity. A moment, if you have some money to
invest, invest it in land, invest it in building and so
contrary to that dictionary, that stupid dictionary I bought in 1989, this is actually one of the great moments
in French architecture except as all private and it's not really recorded in
monumental histories of architecture and furniture of course, and they will begin working also with
Jacob and with others designing furniture both for their commissions
but most importantly on the
right for the seat of the convention, for the seat of an attempt at some
form of representational government. This is a rather poorly chosen print
because it does not demonstrate the peacefulness of the first ever use of
a Greek amphitheater for legislative assembly. It's from this room that we
get the notions of the left and the right politically, the radical
people who sat on the left, the conservative who served on the right. All of those terms come
from the adaptation of the
amphitheatrical form to an experiment in legislation. What should the architecture
of the revolution look like? This was a problem for nearly everyone, although there was not a lot of state
money to build public architecture, public architecture had
basically collapsed. There was the notion
that the convention might finally be stabilized enough to do more
than to renovate part of the Tuileries palace to seat the legislators and might
be able to build monumental buildings, might be able to symbolize itself, might be able to transform the physionomy
of Paris such that Paris would look not like a Royal city,
but a Republican city. Some of the most fantastic forms
are this of Jean Jacques Lequeu imagining a arc of the people. So this representation of the people
on a triumphal arch rather than the triumphal arch for emperors or Kings. This idea of how could you take the whole
heritage of antiquity and turn it to a Republican form? Here's a project for a monument to in
the honor of the Republican armies, who had protected French territory from
foreign invasion in order to re-seat the monarchy, although we're in 1795 here after
the guillotining of Louie XVI, and Marie Antoinette and then the opening
in the year two (1794 for those of you who have not converted) of a series of
competitions of what the architecture of a of the Republic might look like. And
this is an entry by Percier and Fontaine, one of their first attempts to design a
public architecture for the new reality. And it is a monument to those
who have defended the fatherland, the défenseurs de la Patrie. So
entered into this competition, everyone knows nothing
is going to be built. There's going to be an
architectural exhibition, kind
of the first architecture, the école des Beaux-Arts, except not because école des Beaux-Arts
had been abolished. And as you can see, they imagine for the first
time an architecture that
is as much about inscribing names and memory of individual citizens. Fascinating to think that this is
about 200 years before the Vietnam war memorial, in which writing as well as a symbolic
reworking of Roman imagery will become the constituents of their project.
They're also going to be very active, and this is not terribly well known, although Jean Phillipe has begun to
study these exquisite watercolors and gouaches in the the
Bibliothèque Nationale, in the division of the
opera of stage sets. And stage sets which also
record the latest French
voyages and studies of exotic lands. So let's then very briefly look at why
do they become what Jean Philliipe here calls architects of the book.
Unable really to build an exterior, they built an incredible
number of interiors, many of which will be
recorded in their books, a way to make a career
of the private public, to publish their private work.
That's why if you look in the book, it's always apartment for "Monsieur Y (dot dot dot)", or for "citoyen"
for "citizen L (dot dot dot)". We're not supposed to
know whose house this is, it's like a kind of architectural
digest without the clients. So that is what you'll find if
you go through their first book, which comes out as you can see in 1798. By that point, it's not so
dangerous to use both systems. So it's year six of the French Republic, 1798 for the old fogies who
haven't converted, palaces, houses and other modern buildings
drawn in Rome. So not ancient Rome. We have a radical move here
from showing antique knowledge, to looking at modern Rome. Now by
modern Rome, they mean Renaissance Rome. And the most interesting
thing that they say, of course here is the Palazzo Farnese, which by that point had been expropriated
by the French and is today still a French property, but not exactly a model for the
new found wealth of the revolution. They do show that in exquisite
watercolors that show its exterior spaces, its deployment of the classical
language of architecture, to create a rich series of spaces
that are least visible to the public, here rendered in perspective, even if
they cannot walk into the building. But what is really distinctive about
this book is for the first time studying the smaller palaces, even palaces that look somewhere
between large house and palace, as possible models. And here, this is not the University
Club, but rather the Casa Turci, photographed around 1880 but
also recorded here. However, there exists in all of Italy
and especially in Rome, a very large number of charming
residences or residential buildings, which have the most simple forms and
yet they are imprinted with genius, and they demonstrate an attentive
artist, so on and so forth. And so here what they're really saying
is you can turn to the more modest works of of Rome, we're giving them to you.
The economic situation has changed. People are going to be building
smaller houses. Now I've thrown into, because Jean Philippe didn't
take this into practice. We don't have any freestanding buildings
by Percier and Fontaine from the 1790s or from the immediate years after 1800, but here are two that are still
standing. The Hotel Bouillon on the left. I don't know how many of you
have visited that in Paris, i,t's now open on selective days. It's a very rare survival of the empire
period and it's built in the courtyard of another building. So this
creation of smaller houses inside the courtyards of more
aristocratic buildings and on the right, the country house of the architect
Durand from about 1810 still standing in Thiais, which is today a working
class suburb to the South of Paris. But you can see these very modest
buildings, much smaller in scale. We have to take off the 1860s additions
on the top of the bouillon on the left. So that's what's happening,
this sudden explosion, very little recorded in our
histories of architecture, but this is what that book is about. Along with these extraordinary
Frontispieces of each part, which are kind of fantasy. And it goes to the whole point of
whether the so-called Style Empire was translated as a linear style, when
in fact it's a coloristic style. It goes to another thing. If
you're thinking for a moment, I'm showing you a book of 1798. This is the Orr Bible of the Style Empire. The empire was declared in 1804. So what is called the Style Empire is
actually and was called originally the Style Republica, but it was
appropriated by Napoleon. So Napoleon did not
invent the empire style, Percier and Fontaine had in a certain
sense commercialized it already for private clients, and it spread particularly after Napoleon
throughout the Napoleonic occupied parts of Europe and even further, we know copies came to
America very quickly. One of Percier and Fontaine's pupils,
Grandjean de Montigny took it to Brazil. We can follow this style across the globe. So we have a whole tradition
of the fantasy of fragments
in drawings enters into the practice of the École des Beaux-Arts, we also have these extraordinary works
in book illustrations by a Percier and Fontaine here for a
publication of the works of Horace 1799. I wanted to show you this because this
fascination with the garland and the bust, which becomes the language, again looking up to this frieze or
one can think of any number of public buildings taking that over, but at the same time imagining cityscapes
in which buildings are not made up of the classical orders at all, but of a mural architecture
and architecture of walls, of a kind of abstraction of a
rhythm of opening and closing. So let's just quickly look at some
images from it. This is the second book, by which point Percier and Fontaine have
realized really much of their market is in the interior. And we
might say that post Rococo, they are the first figures who want to
make their mark as much on architecture, even grand architecture, as
they do on interior decoration. And in fact Percier and
Fontaine are extraordinary
because they were as talented as interior designers and
interior decorators as they were, as we'll see in my closing slides, people who envisioned a whole new
approach to planning the city. So this is the collection
of interior decorations, that includes everything you need to
know in relationship to furnishing. And that goes on with everything you
need to buy from vases to tripods to candelabra et cetera. Now they tried it out first on themselves
as we know from this absolutely beautiful painting by Boilly of 1798. This is a group of artists. It includes
portraits of Percier and Fontaine among others. That is actually Fontaine with the
bicorne hat at the very center of the composition. Getting together in the
studio of the painter Isabey, which had been redesigned
by Percier and Fontaine, redesigned on a low budget. This is a
low budget number. Everything is painted. Nothing is stucco, nothing is
carved. It's entirely a paint job, but a brilliant paint job that brings
back all of the forms of Trajan's column, of the garlands, everything that they had studied for
monumental architecture now brought into a very delicate, scaled to the
interior, beautiful color schemes. And this is really what gives us a
sense of the palette of the operation of Percier and Fontaine in 1798, as well as when you get a hold of some
of the plates that have been colored up. So this is the, and you
can see how it's published, as the lateral elevation of
the studio of the painter "C.", That means citizen, citoyen, "I."
asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. This is Isabey's studio for
copying and for consumption. This is the bedroom for Josephine. And in fact it was on the success,
and this is really interesting, on the success of what were
basically bourgeois interiors, that Josephine said, "Hey
Napoleon, let's hire these guys. They're really the hot number in
Paris. We're at this new house. We're going to do it up on the cheap". They bought a little country retreat
at Malmaison and they completely transformed it. They also published it, and it is at this point that the
Style Republica and the style of the fashionable in revolutionary Paris
becomes the language of Napoleon and his first wife, ultimately first Empress Josephine
at the estate at Malmaison, which you can visit today, absolutely brilliant transformation
of a relatively modest house into a triumphant celebration of
the aspirations of Napoleon. It is here that he's going to
return from his military campaigns. It's in this house that he will transform
from being the first council to, in 1804, the emperor, by which point he takes
over all the former Royal
residences in and around Paris and moves to palatial scale. But this is a house that sort of mediates
between the work for private citizens of the 1790s and the taking over in
Percier and Fontaine as the official architects of the new
empire. This is the library, which is a brilliant scheme for
those of you who are designers. The problem was there were two radiators, they'd completely screwed up the
scheme. So what Percier did was he said, we will incorporate those
radiators into these aedicules, and that will rhythm the space.
It will also make Napoleon, who is a little bit short, look quite grand framed
along this long axis there. And so a lot of problems of miniature
scale and function were solved through this brilliant device. And
this made them sought after, not only by the bourgeoisie,
but by other Royal families. This is a room made of precious materials
that was shipped to Spain for the court of the King of Spain. They begin creating largely ephemeral
stage sets for the pageantry of empire for military parades, for the
giving out of the Eagles, which are a prize given
to the chiefs of the army, to the staging of the
coronation of Napoleon, not at Reims where the Kings
of France were coronated, but in Notre Dame in Paris, to ultimately the transformation of
the center of Paris into a place for triumphal parades,
triumphal arches, obelisks, columns with the idea that the armies
would return to Paris and that it would have something of the grandeur,
imagined grandeur, of ancient Rome. This was actually, this is one of the only free standing
buildings designed by Percier and Fontaine for Napoleon still
standing. This is today, the triumphal arch of the Carrousel. You
all know it standing inside The Louvre, and now in dialogue with
I.M Pei's glass pyramid. This is actually not a triumphal arch in
free space. It's largely misunderstood. It is the entry gate to the
forecourt of the Tuileries Palace, which is no longer there.
So this is the beginning, this demarcates moving from The
Louvre, which is now a public museum, into the private residence of the emperor. But it is a very archeologically accurate,
if not a one to one, reproduction of the famous arch of
Septimius Severus in the Roman forum, brought to Paris and beautifully, and I want you though to pay attention
to this because as much as people talk about it being a copy, it also deploys a rich variety of
materials and it is as coloristic in its deployment of materials as any
of the hand colored plates. Their biggest project,
and one that we would, and I promise you we won't, we would need at least three hours
to understand is The Louvre and the Tuileries, the design to
reconnect these two palaces. So this is a detail
from the famous Torgot, isometric bird's eye view of Paris from
the middle of the 18th century with a population of something like 1800 people
living in between The Louvre and the Tuileries. So the old
dream is how to clear out, this is urban renewal at its birth,
how to clear out all of that area, several churches to be
several parishes, goodbye. All these people move out and connect
those two palaces into a great composition. This will not be
completed until the second empire, and in many ways, if I
leave you with anything, we're going to go from the
scale of designing for the
private client to an urban vision, hardly realized under Napoleon, but what becomes one of the points of
departure for his nephew Napoleon the Third, and the transformation of Paris under
Haussmann in the years 1850 to 1870. So here is their imagination for how
they might unite those two palaces into a multi courtyard complex, which would not only be suitable of the
grandeur of the empire. We're in 1813, Napoleon is at his high point here. He's not yet beat a defeated
trail back from Moscow. Here is the project all cleared away
and this desire for a grand composition. But key for us to think about is one
thing that they do leave for us in Paris, or probably for that matter anywhere.
And this is the creation Rue de Rivoli. And here those two projects join: the project of working for the emperor
and the project of the real estate boom. But how not now respond
to the real estate boom, but actually to lead the real estate boom
as Percier and Fontaine design a model facade for an arcaded street of apartment
houses that will provide a backdrop to the existing Tuileries
gardens, the royal gardens, which had been public park since 1782, and which will also transform the city
fabric around the combined palace of the Tuileries and Louvre into
something suitable for the
emperor to look at out the window. And that is, so here we have the beginning of the
destructions going on in order to create that street. A popular print of what
it might look like. But most important for us is this street,
despite what the textbooks tell you, was not built by Napoleon. All that Percier and Fontaine did was
they drew up this contract drawing, and if you wanted to buy a
property there and build, that's what you had to build. So this
street was not built by Napoleon. It was built by several score
investors who had to build that, and it's one of the incredible
things that happens. Imperial Paris is in a certain sense
built by a manipulated private market, to a design by Percier and
Fontaine, a very austere design, which in fact takes very little of their
designs of the ornaments of Rome and the like into the creation of the city. I'll just show you one last slide, the last great project of
Fontaine done without Percier, and I'll just show it to you here and
encourage you the next time you're in Paris to visit this under-visited absolute
masterpiece of the late Percier and Fontaine here, Fontaine more specifically,
which is the Chappelle Expiatoire. The expiatory chapel that was construction
begun within days of Napoleon's exile to Elba in the first exile. Louis the 18th who resumed the throne,
who said brilliantly of Napoleon, he said: what are you going
to do about the Tuileries? Napoleon's done so much work
there with Percier and Fontaine, are you going to throw it all out and
rip out their decor and make the building look like Louis the 18th? And
he said, no, it's all right. Napoleon was a very good
tenant, so that could be kept. But Percier and Fontaine were now to
be redeployed to design a expiation monument to the execution of Louis
the 16th and Marie Antoinette, and to the Swiss guard, all of whose remains had been thrown
into common graves on this site. And so the creation of a place to
expiate and try to heal the revolutionary decade. So I just leave you there because I think
it's very poignant to think of these people who started out wanting to design
for Louis the 16th and for France of the 1780s and who will end their
career with one of the finest of their creations, a monument to expiating the
regicide of the French revolution, having themselves lived through
every one of the episodes in between. So I'll stop there. Thanks very much.
