Originally published in Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting and Photography, 1907-1922, edited by Stanislaus von Moos and Arthur Ruegg. New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York by Yale University Press, 2002. 99-107.

From the exhibition: Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, and Photography, 1907-1922.

---

Beginning in 1920 Le Corbusier consistently criticized, at times harshly, French architecture of the classical period. At the same time, however, he continued to draw practical lessons—in terms of conceptual method and principles of composition—from the documents he had studied at the Bibliothèque Nationale in the summer of 1915. To understand his approach to these materials,1 it is particularly valuable to examine the many drawings he completed after consulting two influential books: Gabriel Pérelle’s Topographie de France (published by Jombert in 1753 and 1766) and Pierre Patte’s Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (published in 1765), both of which had engravings.2

French Classicism Between History and Criticism

Jeanneret’s interest in early modern France was conditioned by the self-education that led him to demand precise answers from the study of history. At the same time he compared his results with the documentary analyses that French scholars and art historians had begun to produce in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1915, for example, Jeanneret consulted the volumes of the Procès-verbaux of the Académie royale d’architecture, which had begun to be published in 1911 by Henry Lemonnier, the first professor of early modern art history at the Sorbonne (1893).3 Beginning around 1910, Jeanneret’s curiosity led him to examine the Empire-style interiors of Versailles, Compiègne, and Fontainebleau, images of which he collected in postcard form.4 Lemonnier’s student Louis Hautecoeur also wrote about the genesis of this style, a point of no return as far as the stylistic eclecticism of the nineteenth century was concerned, reaffirming the early studies in French art, between the Revolution and the Empire, published by François Benoît, another student of Lemonnier, in 1897.5 From 1909 onward, Jeanneret’s curiosity about Versailles was matched by a powerful turn of conscience over the cultural role that the palace had played in history, a role emphasized in the monographs and courses that had been taught since 1892 by Pierre de Nolhac, curator at the museum of Versailles,6 Above all, however, it was the work of Marcel Poëte, and his interest in the French context of urban historiography, that galvanized Jeanneret.

In the 1910s Poëte had initiated the systematic revision of Parisian history, from its origins through to the grand transformations of the late nineteenth century.7 This work became an essential source for Jeanneret and the two men were in steady contact during the early 1920s.8 Poëte’s history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, based on period plans and views sparked Jeanneret’s own researches in 1915. The Bibliothèque des Travaux historiques de la ville de Paris, where Poëte was chief curator, mounted an exhibition in 1911 entitled Paris durant la Grande Epoque classique.9 Although far removed from any explicit monarchical pretensions, the Third Republic nevertheless invoked the history of ancien régime France, especially Versailles, as a token of cultural identity.10 In any case, the quest for a national, cultural continuity also included architectural culture.

In the early 1920s several important exhibitions of French architecture of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries proposed philological research as an efficient weapon against both stylish eclecticism and the programmatic denial of any reference to past architecture. These exhibitions were held within a year of each other; one was organized by Robert Danis, director of the new École régionale d’architecture, in Strasbourg (May 1922), and the other, by Louis Hautecoeur, in Paris (January 1923).11 Although critic Léandre Vaillat had few words of praise for the projected cité future (Ville contemporaine) that Le Corbusier presented at the Salon d’Automne in 1922,12 when assessing Hautecoeur’s Paris exhibition of 1923 he focused on the continuity of a classical ideal capable of connecting the history of French architecture to the present: “The way of the world, we have to remember, is that those who proudly call themselves modern today, will become ridiculous and old-fashioned faster than the teachers of yesteryear.”13 Vaillat was clearly alluding to the brand of poetics that would become a recurrent theme in Auguste Perret’s theoretical analysis of his own architecture. It is equally clear exactly whom he meant when he referred to a “new architecture” (architecture nouvelle) that would be innovative in obliterating the historical context.

The Problem with Perret

It was in the spring of 1922 that relations between Perret and Le Corbusier finally deteriorated, after events surrounding the design of the hôtel particulier Gaut.14 They disagreed over two themes essential to classical architecture: the capping cornice and the vertical window.15 Ten years later Le Corbusier still referred to Perret as a “continuateur – pas du tout revolutionnaire” (continuator – not at all a revolutionary) when he recalled Perret’s insistent invitations to visit the Palais de Versailles together (during Le Corbusier’s first Paris sojourn, 1908-9). Le Corbusier’s words unequivocally expressed his own distancing from a modernity that still traced its lineage to French classicism.16 It hardly mattered that Perret criticized at Versailles the lack of structural clarity that he vaunted in his own architectural poetics.17 Even so, it was by comparing the structural organisms of the Dôme des Invalides and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées that Jeanneret, on the eve of World War I, grasped the capacity of contemporary architecture for change.18 When he presented his plans for a Ville contemporaine in 1922, however, it was the editorial of the journal of the Société Centrale des Architectes, L’Architecture, that championed his proposal.19 In an article for the journal, Raymond Cogniat emphasized the legacy of French classicism in Le Corbusier’s designs, despite the criticisms the design had received:

undoubtedly, one may object to the monotony of these rectilinear avenues. Do not our rectilinear perspectives—rue de Rivoli, les Champs-Elysées, la place Vendôme, la place des Vosges, la rue Royale—attract foreigners, surely they will increase admiration.20

In effect, from the late 1920s onward, Le Corbusier distanced himself from the most radical wing of architects (such as Hans Schmidt), who had participated in the creation of the CIAM. This distancing, as well as the academicism identified in his project for the Mundaneum,21 only demonstrated the importance that Le Corbusier attached to French “classical architecture” in his approach to design.

Versailles and the Engravings of Gabriel Pérelle

Pérelle’s engravings are essential to documenting the architecture of Paris and the Île-de-France in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Jeanneret during his studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale, did not focus primarily on their architectural details. Instead, these views apparently led him to understand the buildings as emergent architectural objects on an urban or, better still, an environmental scale.22 In this light, the sketch that he made after Pérelle’s engraving of Saint-Adjuteur du Vernon is a representative example: the settlement had become the subject of the illustration and a hierarchy was adduced from the system of elements that unite the village of Vernon with the suburb of Vernonnet.23 But it was the complex of palace and gardens of Versailles that truly fascinated Jeanneret. His 1915 sketches after Pérelle’s engravings are critical reconsiderations of the palace’s spatial construction—not only the architecture, but also the landscape; this is demonstrated by his repeated studies of the fountains in the park of Versailles. In the case of the bassin de Flore, for example, Jeanneret emphasized the architectural character of the gardens, which evoked an “admirable image of clipped groves with deep fountains, fences, paths etc. (very sculptural)” [emphasis added].24 He reduced Pérelle’s regular and patterned drawing of the water jets to such an extent that the putti, embracing the vases from which the water flows on the central fountain, disappear and all the surrounding figures are either omitted or sketched as abstract marks. Jeanneret was mainly impressed by the scale of the groves, those constructed masses that seemed to him to define urban and architectural space. In a contemporary notation he alluded to the difficulty that a lay person would have in reading the “engraved bird’s-eye views of the gardens of Lenôtre [sic]”; in effect what was required was a spatial perception of the garden as architectural object: entering the house, here are the billowy volumes, that move in rhythm, that lighten or darken, that are intensely, violently or delicately colored. It is the same when one penetrates the gardens of Lenotre.25

The Gardens

The study of seventeenth-century French gardens had a profound impact on Jeanneret’s approach to early modern, architectural classicism precisely because of its prerogative as planned space.26 This aspect began to dominate the notes he drew from Antoine Dézallier d’Argenville’s Théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1747 edition). He was interested not only in the design of the boulingrins (“bowling greens”) and parterres, but also in the garden’s other three-dimensional and tectonic elements, its cabinets, salles, pièces, cloîtres.27 It is no coincidence that one undated study, which examined the gardens of the Orangerie de Versailles, emphasized the counterpoint inherent in the “pointillisme cubique” of the flower boxes of oranges and dwarf oranges “that play with the adjacent flower beds.”28 His drawings of the fountains of Latone and Apollo go on to underscore the mass and volume of the adjacent woods.29 His notation on the drawing of the fountain of Latone also suggests the wide gap between his concerns and those of contemporary art historians: “the prestige of Louis XIV is great because of today’s Versailles, and not because of some bygone marvel where the colorful stories might just as well be the gossip of courtesans.”30

This idea of grandeur was born from his reading of a geometry of space that dissolved only at the horizon. In the margin of the same drawing, Jeanneret also wrote: “The large avenues—today, grand cathedral naves, consist of countless small bands of chestnut trees at the end of a row— … in Clagny, in Sceaux just as in Versailles one thought large and for the future.”31 Hence Jeanneret used line to stress the progression of the avenues toward the horizon, almost as though they were a system of ascending ramps. In his sketch the horizontal plane seems to rise up to meet the viewer.

Jeanneret’s interpretation of the engraving of the fountain of Apollo appears all the more significant: He elevates and, more importantly, shifts the perspective from the axis of Pérelle’s representation. This deliberate rotation departs from the axiality of the geometric system around the basin, but does not negate it. Instead it focuses attention on a system of axes at the scale of the landscape and one readily recalls the bird’s-eye perspectives that Le Corbusier later adopted to represent space on the grand scale, like those of the “centre de Paris” in the Plan Voisin.

“Louis XIV S’est Trompé”

Two sketches are particularly evocative of the relationship between the Palais de Versailles and the surrounding areas: once again they depart from Pérelle’s engravings depicting Versailles from opposite sides of the palace courtyard. In the first instance,32 Jeanneret concentrates on the plastic elements that characterize its spatial disposition, in particular the two curvilinear ramps that lead from the entrance and bridge the difference in level between the courtyard and the two terraces stretched along the palace wings. These ramps become still more evident in the second sketch, which emphasizes their correspondence with the system of parterres and allées that branch off from the entrance and bypass the stables in a star-shaped arrangement. The other feature that Jeanneret emphasizes is the staggered profile of the main palace block surrounding the courtyard, which Pérelle had illustrated in the first engraving. The sketch that Le Corbusier traced from this engraving reappeared in Vers un architecture in 1923. By that time Le Corbusier had chosen a polemical tone, denying the project’s star shaped planning: a man has only two eyes, at a height of 1 meter 70 [centimeters], which can only fix upon one point at a time. You can only see the arms of the stars one at a time—and they are like a right-angle masked by foliage. A right-angle is not a star; stars disappear. And so on; the large fountain, the embroidered flower beds that are not part of a total vision, the buildings that can be seen in fragments and by moving around. This is the snare and illusion. Louis XIV deceived himself by his own volition. He violated the architectural truths because he did not proceed with the objective elements of architecture.33

Despite this critique, Le Corbusier still included the staggered plan of the Versailles cour d’honneur in one of his earliest projects to integrate the scales of landscape and architecture—the rues à redents.34 Moreover, the similarities between his studies for the palace of the League of Nations in Geneva and the scheme of the Palais de Versailles still resonate in 1926.35 Although he chose to denounce the vanité immense of Louis XIV by 1923, in the summer of 1915 the lesson of Versailles was still a prime motivating force for him, because it was the Sun King whom he credited for active innovation outside the boundaries of the medieval city. As Jeanneret observed:

examining the prints of Pérelle, one finds a Paris so poorly organized, so picturesque and so dirty, that one imagines the desire to clean, and even almost a helplessness to create an ensemble, because everything must be redone—quays, houses, etc. Palace, pinnacles, gables, spires, lanterns, etc. One understands why Louis XIV left for Versailles, a new place.36

Not surprisingly, therefore, Jeanneret’s interest in Pérelle’s engraved representations of urban buildings was limited to reading the interludes—the Observatoire, the Invalides, even the Jardins des Plantes—that, like Versailles, challenged the city’s compact fabric.37

Pierre Patte and the Example of the “Embellissements”

Jeanneret consulted the four volumes of Jacques-François Blondel’s Architecture françoise (1752-56), which together with Blondel’s theoretical works were essential to understanding the overall context of French classical architecture.38 The most conspicuous collection of Jeanneret’s sketches and notes from 1915, however, are actually based on Patte’s publication of the projects for the places royales commissioned by Louis XV. During his research for “La Construction des villes” (already completed),39 Jeanneret may have made his first contacts with the French eighteenth-century theory of embellissements, while he was in Germany, via the work of Werner Hegemann and Albert Erich Brinckmann.40 This initiation was enriched in 1915 when Jeanneret began systematically combing through the original documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Jeanneret’s interest stretched well beyond historical analysis; his aim was to establish a repertoire of models through his own reexamination of Patte’s engraved plates.41

The organization of plates in the Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (1765) became Jeanneret’s authentic guide to understanding urban design in France during the mid-eighteenth century, from the scale of the building to that of the city. It was an understanding that Jeanneret acquired both in the spirit of analysis and of reformulation,42 one in which his interest in the consistency of scale predominated. The case of Rouen serves as an example. Patte had devoted several plates to Carpentier’s project for the new hôtel de ville. Jeanneret rapidly distilled its elevations while concentrating on Rouen’s overall urban layout, duplicating Patte’s pertinent comments about the “chain of remarkable buildings, where the Place du Roi could be considered as the city center.”43 In the same spirit, Jeanneret interpreted the linkage of open spaces in Nancy – where the volume of the Place Louis XV (onto which the town hall faced) was connected to that of the Place de la Carrière. Moreover, at Nancy, the Place de la Carrière was circumscribed by “uniformly decorated buildings erected at the King’s expense,”44 including the double exedrae that the Hôtel de l’Intendance faced. Jeanneret noted on the page: “Nothing is so beautiful and nothing declares itself so majestically as that building. The ground floor is open and leads to a public garden.”45

On many later occasions Jeanneret would return to the concatenations of Nancy, especially the manner in which its gardens complemented the architecture.46 Yet, in this regard, it was the Place de Louis XV in Paris that interested him most and would become part of his intellectual journey to understanding the city’s growth. His drawings only confirm the importance he attached to the relationship between urban space and natural context, whether exemplified by the River Seine or the Jardin des Tuileries. The 90-degree rotation of Patte’s engraving of the overall plan emphasizes the relationship between the river and the axis connecting the place to the church of the Madeleine by way of the rue Royale.47

Shaping the Riverfront

Jeanneret’s focus on the transformations of Paris along the Seine was constant, as is evident from his choice of Pérelle’s engraving of the Porte de la Conférence. Jeanneret’s interest recalls the emphasis that Poëte had placed on this aspect in his reading of the urban development of Paris between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.48 Jeanneret noted the dimensions and catalogued the elements that made up the Place Louis XV, but his drawings reveal his interest in the relationship between the jardins des Tuileries and the space of the place.49 He stressed the “terrasses promenoirs pour jouir de la place” (promenades for enjoyment of the place) and redesigned Patte’s view of the Tuileries, framing the octagonal fountain with two semielliptical ramps that lead toward the same terraces.50 The theme of the ramp reappears here, as at Versailles, as a promenade between nature and architecture, the conceptual origin of the promenade architectural that would become part of Le Corbusier’s architecture during the 1920s, as for example in the curvilinear ramp in the gallery of the Villa La Roche.

The Coalition Against “Pastiche”

Jeanneret, therefore, used his historical reading of the city as a way of understanding the present. The objective of his critique was that same language of eclectic pastiche that academic and professional circles also attacked during the early postwar period.

The feeling of volume so powerfully expressed in previous eras disappeared in the 19th century. The “Classicism” of that period wished to retain from that past only the outlines with which it had expressed itself; it had lost its spirit. Hypnotized by the magnificent mementos of Louis XIV and Louis XV, our builders have studded our towns with star- and square-shaped places with monuments situated in the geometric center, on the pretext that they are no different from the splendid forms that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have handed down to us. By applying this dry and arid formula, they forget art, which is to say, they do not trouble themselves with volume, contrasts, nor “human scale;” in a word, they ignore corporality.51

The interest that the projects recorded by Patte assumed in Jeanneret’s eyes is exemplified by the attention he devoted to Patte’s plan d’extension de la cité, placed in the margins of a plate that once again joined several projects for embellishing the map of Paris.52 Jeanneret highlighted the focal points – the “mushroom” of water at the point of the island, the obelisks, the statue of Louis XV, and the connecting bridges. In particular he examined the western knot of these interlinked isles, marking the key elements of urban composition with annotations: a “new, colossal cathedral at the place dauphine,” “the large flight of stairs [that leads] directly to the Point Neuf,” the space fronting the eastern facade of the Louvre, its counterpart on the Left Bank, and the twin churches that had caused the destruction of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.53 Jeanneret’s decision to note down the few technical details that Patte announced, like the “redesigned quays, with galleries below, where one could place the empty water hoses” is equally significant. It is also quite evident that in Jeanneret’s eyes this project was an unprecedented example of forceful intervention in an urban center. The conclusions he reached when faced with these projects translated into a warning against contemporary planning culture. One of his notations reads:

It is an interesting idea: during the time of Louis XV, one can see what [Patte] foresaw. Everything opened, breathed and acquired breadth. Today such an approach would be unfeasible because to live, those squares must have narrow road openings, etc. Today one needs enormity, an abundance of other factors: let us therefore create accordingly, with equal audacity! [emphasis added].54

Patte’s proposals represented important stimuli for the experimental, citywide designs that Le Corbusier would propose for Paris. They suggested the real design solutions with which he planned “to liberate” the center of the city with the Plan Voisin, exhibited at the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau in 1925. Beyond its formal content, his method of looking at urban space was nourished by the experiments of the eighteenth century.

© Bard Graduate Center, Antonio Brucculeri.