Syllabus Outline: François Blondel and Claude Perrault of French Academic Tradition
FRENCH ACADEMIC TRADITION: Architectural thought in France at the start of the seventeenth century, like that in Italy and Spain, was predicated on the notion that the art of architecture participated in a divinely sanctioned cosmology or natural order: a stable grammar of eternally valid forms, numbers, and proportional relations transmitted to the present from ancient times.
The term academy of course goes back to the park within Athens in which Plato conversed with his students; the word was revived in fifteenth-century Italy, when it became widely applied to any philosophical discussion, formal or informal. The circle of intellectuals gathered around Giangiorgio Trissino in Vincenza, where Palladio began his higher education in the 1530s, was called an academy because of its emphasis on propagating classical learning. Perhaps the crown jewel of this elaborate academic academic bureaucracy in France was the Royal Academy of Architecture, which opened its doors in 1671.
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The founded on December 30, 1671 by Baptiste Colbert, his Finance minister.
was a king of France under the impulsion of Jean-
Its first director was the mathematician and engineer included of school of architecture.
The
Suppressed in 1793, this Académie was later merged into the , together with the Académie de peinture et de sculpture (Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded 1648) and the Académie de musique (Academy of Music, founded in 1669). The Académie des beaux-arts is now one of the five Académies of the Institut de France.
With the founding of these institutions, Colbert and the king Louis XIV had accomplished several things. First, they created a prestigious class of “academicians” with special privileges and responsibilities responsibilities for instruction. Second, they brought all artistic instruction under a centralized authority. The rules of each discipline were now to be strictly mandated; further, they were to be based on ancient and Renaissance precedents.
The purpose of the Royal Academy of Architecture was not only to co dify the principles of classical design but also to espouse these principles, which it did by holding two public lectures a week. The first hour of each session was devoted to the theoretical side of architecture; this was followed by a talk on a technical aspect of the field, such as the rudiments of Euclidean geometry. The first director of the Royal Academy of Architecture was a mathematician and engineer, Francois Blondel.
FRANÇOIS BLONDEL: François Blondel (1618 - 1686), the Great Blondel, 17th C French architect best known for his teaching and writing, which contributed greatly to architectural theory and the taste of his time. •
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Although he had come late to Architecture, Blondel was an interesting polymath with considerable intelligence and solid accomplishments. He was a mathematician, soldier, engineer of fortifications, diplomat, civil engineer and military architect,
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Over the course of a lengthy career, he had distinguished himself in military and naval battles;
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undertook a diplomatic mission to Turkey; visited Italy, Greece, and Egypt;
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gave lectures on mathematics at the Collège de France;
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Immediately preceding his appointment, he had served as the mentor to Colbert’s second son on his Italian tour. 1671, the King named Blondel Director and Professor of the Académie d'architecture.
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1648 Blondel received his first architectural commission, the grand stables at the Château de Chaumont-la-Guiche in Saint-Bonnet-deJoux in southern Burgundy. The stables were executed 1648 – 1652 by the local mason and entrepreneur François Martel, to whom the design has frequently been attributed. The cross-vaulted ground floor is divided into three aisles by two Tuscan arcades with stalls for more than eighty horses. On the exterior of the entrance front are two impressive double staircases ascending to a large hall on the upper floor. They frame the central portal, strikingly surmounted by a life-sized equestrian statue of the previous seigneur,
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In 1669 was commissioned with urbanization projects for the embellishment of Paris, Notably the reconstruction of the and the , and the plan for the city's expansion, which he accomplished with the collaboration of the architect Pierre Bullet. The was designed by architect François Blondel and the sculptor Michel Anguier at the order of Louis XIV in honor of his victories on the Rhine and in Franche-Comté. Built in 1672 and paid for by the city of Paris, it replaced a medieval gate in the city walls built by Charles V in the 14th century. 1671, the King named Blondel Director and Professor of the Académie d'architecture.
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A monument defining the official art of its epoque, the Porte Saint-Denis provided the subject of the engraved frontispiece to Blondel's influential Cours d'architecture, 1698 The purpose of the Royal Academy of Architecture was not only to codify the principles of classical design but also to espouse these principles, teach theoretical side of architecture and technical aspect of the field, such as the rudiments of Euclidean geometry.
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Perhaps foremost was the reform of the classical tradition in light of the perceived abuses of the baroque period. And herein also lay France’s declaration of architectural independence – its desire to define itself apart from the Italian classical legacy and to surpass the works of Italian architects with its own achievements.
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Thus in many ways antiquity and not the Renaissance became the new starting point for French theoretical development.
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If modern French architecture, in line with the other arts, was to emulate the masterworks of Roman antiquity, great care had to be taken to select approved models. In the realm of theory, the teachings of Vitruvius naturally took precedence, and only when this author left matters in doubt were the Renaissance interpretations of Palladio, Scamozzi, Vignola, Serlio, and Alberti to be consulted for edification.
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His teachings rested on the very traditional notion that architectural beauty derives primarily from proportions. Further, he believed that architectural proportions (perceived by the eye), like musical tonalities (perceived by the ear), emanate from a higher cosmic order, and the perception of these consonances is made possible by an idea divinely implanted in the mind. Indeed, Blondel accepted the arguments of his friend, the musicologist René Ouvrard, who in his Architecture harmonique (Harmonic architec ture) would insist“ that a building cannot be perfect if it does not follow the same rules as composition or the harmonizing of musical chords.” His precepts placed him in opposition with the heading
in the larger culture war known under
CLAUDE PERRAULT :
Claude Perrault, (1613-1688, Paris), is a French physician and amateur architect who, together with Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and François d’Orbay, designed the eastern facade of the Louvre.
He also achieved success as a physician and anatomist, and as an author, who wrote treatises on physics and natural history
Perrault’s training was in mathematics and medicine, and he was a practicing physician. He was elected a member of the newly founded Academy of Sciences in 1666, and in 1673 he produced a renowned French annotated translation of Vitruvius’s architectural treatise. Claude’s brother, Charles, was assistant to J.-B. Colbert, the superintendent of works under Louis XIV, and Charles saw to it that Claude, who had little practical experience, was appointed to the three-man commission responsible for the rebuilding of the Louvre.
Translation of Vitruvius ‘ De Architecture’ into French in 1673. Rejected traditional and renaissance concepts of beauty and proportion and rigid criteria governing classical orders. Derived inter relationship between music and Architecture.
According to him, music is perceived and appreciated by the sense of hearing while Architecture is primarily perceived through the sense of sight. Since different sense organs are involved in the perceptions of music and Architecture, the principles which govern production of pleasing music cannot be valid for the production of pleasing architecture.
Denied the need for optical corrections. According to Perrault, the human mind, after perceiving the optical illusions can make the corrections itself. Proposed new ratios for orders based on the arithmetic mean of historic examples. Believed that contemporary architecture was marching along path of development superior to ancient efforts and capable of further evolution.
he made a valuable contribution in acoustics. His treatise on sound was a part of the book Oeuvres diverses de Physique et de Mecanique. In his later book, he treats such subjects as sound media, sources of sound and sound receivers. In musical acoustics, he noted the importance of vibration on consonance and dissonance. His study "De la Musique des Anciens" in the Oeuvres diverses discussed how combinations of notes yields harmony.
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Perrault won the competition held by Louis XIV for a design for the eastern façade of the Louvre Palace, beating out even Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who had traveled from Italy expressly for the purpose. This work consumed Perrault from 1665 to 1680, and established his reputation: the severely designed colonnade overlooking the Place du Louvre — for which buildings including the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon were demolished to provide the necessary urban space — and the Quai du Louvre, became widely celebrated.
Little that could be called Baroque can be identified in Perrault’s cool classicism that looks back to the 16th century. The façade, divided into five parts, is a typical solution of French classicism. The simple character of the ground floor basement sets off the paired Corinthian columns, modeled strictly according to Vitruvius, against a shadowed void, with pavilions at the ends. This idea of coupled columns on a high podium goes back as far as Bramante. Those rhythmical columns form a shadowed colonnade w ith a central pedimented triumphal arch entrance raised on a high, rather defensive base. Crowned by an uncompromising Italian balustrade along its distinctly non-French flat roof, the whole ensemble represents a ground-breaking departure in French architecture.
It is built without wood (to avoid fire) or metal (to avoid magnetic disturbances). In the summer solstice of 1667, the orientation (north-south) is traced in its place by members of the Académie Royale. It is a large rectangle (31 m x 29 m) with its four faces oriented with the cardinal points of the compass. The latitude of the south face defines the Paris latitude (48° 50' 11''). The meridian line passing through its center defines the Paris longitude.
The foundations are as deep (27 m) as high is the building itself. In this dee p basement is the Bureau International de l'Heure (International Time Bureau) who sets the coordinated universal time (UTC) with 10 6 sec. of accuracy. Since 1933, the speaking clock (tel. 3699) gives the accurate time. The basement is connected with the Paris catacombs. The catacombs consist of 65 km of underground galleries
Perrault's design for a triumphal arch on Rue StAntoine was preferred to competing designs of Charles Le Brun and Louis Le Vau, but was only partly executed in stone. When the arch was taken down in the 19th century, it was found that the ingenious master had devised a means of so interlocking the stones, without mortar, that it had become an inseparable mass.
The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns began overtly as a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française. •
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Disputes among scholars concerning the superiority of classical Greek and Roman authors over contemporary writers have occurred at least since the time of the Renaissance. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, such debates turned into heated conflicts, particularly in France and England. In these two countries theQuerelle des Anciens et des Modernes and the Battle of the Books pitted the Ancients — who upheld the authority of the writers of antiquity in intellectual matters — against the Moderns — who maintained that writers of the present day possessed greater knowledge and more-refined tastes than their predecessors. Underlying these positions were fundamental assumptions regarding the state of art, culture, and human knowledge. The Ancients viewed Greco-Roman civilization as the apex of human achievement and all subsequent culture as a decline from this high point. Thus, they contended, writers of the present were in no position to judge the ancients, who were their superiors. The Moderns, on their side, saw human knowledge and understanding as progressing since antiquity. They considered classical works as admirable in certain respects, but also crude and in need of correction and improvement. In the course of these debates human knowledge, which previously had been regarded as an undifferentiated whole, began to be divided into broad categories. Areas of inquiry such as science and mathematics, which depend upon the intellect, were for the first time distinguished from the pursuits of art and literature, which rely upon the imagination. Perrault’s various concerns regarding accepted features of classical theory at the same time called into question the teachings of Blondel. Blondel responded, and it came in 1683, when he published the second volume of his Cours d’architecture. The academy director, devoted three chapters of his book to contesting this particular footnote and also mounted a harsh attack on the Louvre design. His response essentially defined the opening round of a broader cultural debate in France, later known as the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” in which Blondel, through his defense of antiquity, took the side of the ancients. With regard to the Louvre design, Blondel was above all suspicious of the amount of reinforcing iron used in the colonnade. Solidity in architecture, he insisted, requires architects not to take shortcuts that reduce “confidence” in the stability of the design, and in any case the ancients with their heavier buildings, did not have to rely on this recourse. He also questioned the structural advantages of the coupled-column solution, which Bondel opposed the justification of Gothic features ….“I have nothing to say of that love that he attributes to our nation for daylight and openness, because we can admit at the same time that it still partakes of the Gothic, and in this it is therefore very different from that of the ancients. It is also very true that this same reasoning has opened the door at all times to the disorder that is found in architecture and in the other arts.”
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Perrault responded cleverly resonating with the Cartesian doubt that imbued his scientific training – took the form of a greatly expanded footnote in the second edition of his translation of Vitruvius,issued in 1684 ” A blind adherence to ancient practices would effectively stifle all progress or modern innovation; on the other hand, he proudly admits to the taint of Gothicism ” ,
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Perrault published his own architectural treatise, Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (Ordonnance for the five kinds of columns after the method of the ancients), which issued an even more threatening challenge to Blondel’s academic teachings Raised a problem -That Renaissance theory (both in Italy and in France) had been unable to resolve – that of devising a uniform system for the proportioning of columns. The problem was in fact a long-standing one, as Renaissance architects had recognized.The system proposed by Vitruvius was unacceptable, first because the Roman architect had not provided sufficient details,Second because he himself had admitted that the basic proportions for the orders had changed over time, and Third because the columns in surviving Roman buildings (mostly from imperial times) did not have the proportions that he prescribed. In searching for a unified system in keeping with the belief in absolute beauty, Renaissance architects fro m Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 72) to Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552 – 1616) had proposed systems for quantifying dimensions.Thus,an urgent problem of the newly established Academy ofArchitecture was to define with precision the system usedby Roman architects and so make it available as a guide for modern use.
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To this end Colbert sent the student Antoine Desgodetz (1653 – 1728) to Rome in 1674 with the mission of measuring the principal Roman monuments. The trip proved eventful from the start, as both Desgodetz and his traveling companion, Augustin- Charles d’Aviler, were kidnapped by pirates on their way south and had to be ransomed by the crown before they co uld start work. When Desgodetz eventually returned to Paris in 1677, he brought with him measurements of almost fifty buildings. Twenty-five monuments were chosen to be engraved in a volume published by the crown in 1682, under the title Les Edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement (The ancient buildings of Rome drawn and measured very exactly). Yet far from revealing the system used in antiquity, Desgodetz’s research rather demonstrated that no common dimensional system prevailed and that the measurements of such renownedRenaissance authors as Serlio and Palladio were filledwith inacc uracies when compared with his “very exact”measurements.
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Blondel seems not to have cared much for th e conclusions of Desgodetz’s study .
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Perrault, who was also following the events closely, was by contrast intriguedby Desgodetz’s findings, and they must have served as a challenge to his scientific mind. Indeed, the first goal of Perrault’s Ordonnance was to propose a new system of proportionalratios for the columnar orders, which he devised by working in an empirical fashion. He gathered measurements from buildings and treatises of ancient and modern authors and derived from them the arithmetical mean for each unit of the columns and entablatures – invoking the premise that “good sense” on the part of the architect prescribed the choice of the mean between two extremes.44 His system of “probable mean proportions” was also based on an i nnovation of his, the petit module (a thi rd of the diameter of a column), which allowed the architect to employ simple numbers (instead of fractions) for smaller parts. This belief now led him to propose two different types of beauty for architecture: positive and arbitrary.
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In the first category belong those beauties based on “convincing reasons” easily apprehended by everyone, such as “the richness of the materials,the size and magnificence of the building, the precisionand cleanness of the execution, and symmetry.”
is thus reminiscent of absolute beauty, but only in the sense that its appreciation
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is universal.
,on the other hand, is “determi ned by our wish to give a definite
proportion, shape, or form to things that might well hav e a different form without being misshapen and that appear agreeable not by reasons within everyone’s grasp but merely by custom and the association the mind makes b etween two things of a different na ture.” •
Drawing upon his continuing medical research, for instance, he denounces the notion of shared harmonic values for music and architecture on the grounds that the ear and the eye process perceptual data in different ways. The former works without the mediation o f the intellect, while the eye perceives entirely through the intervention of knowledge.
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Perrault’s views would not win many followers.
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Blondel died in 1686 and his successor, Philippede la Hire (1640 – 1718), would leave in place his teachings regarding absolute beauty and proportions.
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Perrault himself would die in 1688 – conscientious scientist that he was, of an infection incurred while dissecting a camel.
