French architecture

“ To these should be added many noteworthy theatres, town-halls, court-houses, and préfectures in provincial cities, and commemorative columns and monuments almost without number. In street architecture there is now much more variety and originality than formerly, especially in private houses, and the reaction against the orders and against traditional methods of design has of late been growing stronger. 375 The chief excellence of modern French architecture lies in its rational planning, monumental spirit, and refinement of detail (Fig. 212) . ”

“ Their excessive richness contrasts strikingly with the severe though noble simplicity of the remainder of the façade, and displays not only that tendency to lavish all the resources of art upon the doorways, which so especially characterises French art, but also illustrates, in the most striking manner, the absolute independence of the architecture of mere ornamentation, and, at the same time, the freedom with which it avails itself of it ”

“ Its architecture combines most strikingly the characteristics of the two nations. It blends in one harmonious whole the massive solidity of English structure overlaid with detail, formed by lines vertical, rigid, dry, and hard as iron, and the mingled [94] grace and strength of French architecture, which may fitly be compared with gold, in its union of [95] the supple and the durable, of solidity and power of resistance equal to those of the less precious metal, with an adaptability to artistic ends far greater.
62. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. TRANSEPT
63. ”

“ Here we have in one building the superimposed bases and interpenetrating mouldings of the latest French Gothic and the fish-bladder tracery of the Renaissance, and in the dormers the stride from the ogee canopies of Rouen to the prim pilasters and pediment of Orleans. Mr. Hunt’s skill has not sufficed to introduce together these features, the outcomes of different modes of thought as well as of different systems of construction, without a visible incongruity; nor are they in all cases successful, taken singly. ”

“ The building, a triumphal arch flanked by pavilions, forming the entry to the processional road from Whitehall, is a dignified design.
In France, still the leading artistic nation of the world, the art of architecture has been in a most flourishing and most active state in the most recent period. It is true that there is not the same variety as in modern English architecture, nor have there been the same discussions and Recent French architecture.experiments in regard to the true aim and course of architecture which have excited so much interest in England ”

“ Here the classical orders are more at home, and although the high roof, the monumental chimneys, and the huge and towering dormers are still of the French Renaissance proper, with but little direct Italianate influence, it is easy to see how everywhere in the mouldings, in the larger details, the classical feeling of the architect has had its way. ”

“ Yet in some quarters before this time an interest in the arts of antiquity was gaining foothold, and a few Italian artists had come into France and wrought some small architectural works in the neo-classic manner. But the way appears to have been opened for a more general movement in the new direction when the French upper classes began to construct fine houses adapted to the requirements of luxurious life. ”

“ The school of design which has proved the greatest attraction to the blossoming genius of America is, of course, French Renaissance, preëminently at the time I write. To say that an architect is a Beaux Arts man is equivalent to speaking of a certain much advertised brand of whiskey, in that compliments are superfluous. ”

“ IN GENERAL. French Renaissance architecture is marked by good proportions and harmonious and appropriate detail. Its most interesting phase was unquestionably that of Francis I., so far, at least, as concerns exterior design. It steadily progressed, however, in its mastery of planning; and in its use of projecting pavilions crowned by dominant masses of roof, it succeeded in preserving, even in severely classic designs, a picturesqueness and variety otherwise impossible. Roofs, dormers, chimneys, and staircases it treated with especial success ”

“ Our 'national style' we are sure can never be born of any such travesties. Borrowed architecture never fits well.
The fact is, we ignore the first great principle—the essence and sine qua non, of the art—DECORATED CONSTRUCTION. By construction is meant that mechanical arrangement of parts which is best suited to convenience and most conducive to stability. It is what the French would call the motif, the end in view, while decoration is only the means. ”

“ We now arrive at the Hôtel-de-Ville, Place de Grève; the first stone of this interesting and venerable pile was laid in 1533, but was not completely finished until 1606, in the reign of Henry IV. The style of architecture is that which the French call La Renaissance des Arts, it is rich, rather heavy, and has an antique appearance; it is exactly according to the taste which prevailed in the 16th century, and was brought into vogue by Italian architects. ”

“ Although during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the art of painting on the walls of churches, and of otherwise employing colour in architecture, was extensively practised in all the countries of Europe, yet there was nothing in other countries of essentially different character from that which was produced in France. The tenderness of sentiment and elegance of design which give charm to the works of French genius were not, indeed, equalled in other countries ”

“ The balconies formed by the ledges over the lower arches are enclosed with balustrades, and balustrades connect the buttresses over the main cornice. The roof is very low and invisible, thus there are no dormers, but large chimneys ornamented with blind arcading break the sky line.
Such is the early Renaissance architecture of France. Notwithstanding its factitiousness, and its ornamental incongruities, it still has, as I have said, a distinctly French expression, though it has not the reasonable character of the native art of the Middle Ages in its integrity. ”

“ English builders assimilated the constructive principles of the architects of Anjou and of the Ile-de-France. In the numerous cathedrals they raised from the thirteenth to the close of the fifteenth century it is easy to trace the original characteristics of French art throughout all the transformations or adaptations by which its methods were modified in accordance with British usages and ideas. ”

“ As features in the exterior of their buildings, the roofs have been in every period valued by the French architects; they are almost always steep, striking, and ornamented. All appropriate modes of giving prominence and adding ornament to a roof have been very fully developed in French Gothic architecture, and the roofs of semicircular and circular apses, staircase towers, &c., may be almost looked upon as typical. ”

“ The hour was ripe for the solution. Gothic architecture was the spontaneous invention of French builders at the dawn of the XII century, at a time when the poetry of France was imposing itself on the whole of Europe. ”

“ An exceptional building of the early French Renaissance is the château of St. Germain en Laye. The top story of this building is vaulted, and to meet the vault thrusts a series of deep buttresses is ranged along each façade. These buttresses are connected by arches at the level of the floor of the principal story [8] and beneath the main cornice, and entablatures, which crown the basement and the principal floor, break around them. ”

“ That expansive force which made our national art the great civilising medium of the Middle Ages was derived from our own early architects, civil and religious. The principles and practice of monumental art were carried by French architects into all countries, though the results of their teaching are more conspicuous in Italy and Germany than elsewhere. Native builders and artists established the supremacy of French art throughout Western Europe, and even in the East. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Without knowledge of the French architectural past, without the inhibitions instilled early in French architects by their training at the École des Beaux-Arts, foreign architects readily derived from published sources a Second Empire mode considerably lusher than was generally approved for public use in French academic circles and made it very much their own. Even in public architecture foreigners must have seen current work with different eyes from the French. ”

“ No study of house-decoration as a branch of architecture has for at least fifty years been published in England or America; and though France is always producing admirable monographs xxi on isolated branches of this subject, there is no modern French work corresponding with such comprehensive manuals as d'Aviler's Cours d'Architecture or Isaac Ware's Complete Body of Architecture. ”

“ Each is a type of different architecture, and no matter how grand and imposing, each is called a "cottage." The greatest rivalry has been shown in construction, and the styles cover all known methods of building—Gothic, Elizabethan, Tudor, Swiss, Flemish, French, with every sort of ancient house in Britain or Continental Europe, imitated and improved upon, and in some cases widely varying systems being condensed together. ”

“ Beginning with François II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent. The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron. Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity. Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versâ. It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter’s of Rome. ”

“ May we not hope to see our native granite reposing in the ever-during strength of the Doric, or springing up in the grand and lofty Gothic, in forms which beauty and utility, the eye and the judgment, taste and devotion, shall unite to approve and to admire? But while we regard sacred and civil architecture as highly important, let us not forget that other branch, so essential to personal comfort and happiness,—domestic architecture or common house-building. ”

“ In the later decades of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Classical revolution in architecture was getting under way, projects were often of more interest than executed buildings for their premonitions of what was to come, and this was particularly true in France. ”

“ And if these old wooden houses seem to us wanting (as many are wanting) in the appliances and fittings which modern habits have rendered necessary, it was assuredly no fault of the 15th-century architect. They display both in design and construction, most conspicuously, the elements of common sense in meeting the requirements of their own day, which is, as has been well remarked, "the one thing wanting to give life to modern architecture;" and they have a character and individuality about them which renders almost every building unique. ”

“ Every necessity becomes a motive of decoration. The roofs, the leading off of the water, the introduction of light, the means of access and circulation to the different stages of the building—even less important matters, such as iron-work, lead-work, ties, props, the means of warming and ventilation, not only are not concealed, as is so often done in our buildings since the sixteenth century, but are, on the contrary, frankly acknowledged, and contribute, by their ingenious combination and the taste which ever presides over their execution, to the enrichment of the architecture. ”

“ They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in beauty at thirty shillings a foot. We shall have no more architecture in Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express themselves in the materials of the age—steel, concrete, and glass—and to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms. ”

“ Thus we see that the adoption of the arched system of construction, unbiassed by any pre-existing laws of art, but aided only by the very rational desire to utilise the materials most abundantly provided by nature, led to two of the most important characteristics common to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, viz., the sub-ordinated arch and the clustered column, with the whole system of decoration derived from them; than which no two features can be pointed out which have been more richly fruitful of architectural forms the most original and beautiful. ”

“ More exquisite curves, better studies for a healthy-minded and original architect, could hardly be found. The interlacing branches are suggestive of tracery-patterns, not to be outdone even in the flamboyant windows of York and Rouen. There is no excuse for the squat, ugly, and stupid arches one sees in almost every attempt at pointed architecture, when the elm-tree springs by every riverside in the land. ”