Chapter 8: Notes

Footnote 179:

A notably extreme early example is Visconti’s Fontaine Molière of
1841-4 in the Rue de Richelieu in Paris.

Footnote 180:

Here Visconti’s taste also proves to have been premonitory. His
project of 1833 for a library already had a bulbous roof over the
central pavilion; while that of 1849 for the Bibliothèque Nationale in
the Rue de Richelieu had bold engaged orders on the central pavilion
and a tall straight-sided mansard as well.

Footnote 181:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Second Empire “avant la lettre”’, _Gazette des
Beaux Arts_, XIII (1953), 115-30. The existence of French analogues in
the forties was insufficiently stressed there, however.

Footnote 182:

See Kramer, E. W., ‘Detlef Lienau, an Architect of the Brown Decades’,
_Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XIV (1955),
18-25. Lienau was born in Schleswig-Holstein, then Danish, but
received his early education in Germany. For a still earlier mansard
than Lienau’s, see Dallett, J. F. ‘John Notman’s Mansard, 1848’,
_Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XIX (1960), 81.

Footnote 183:

See Aulanier, C., _Le Nouveau Louvre de Napoleon III_, Paris [1953],
and Hautecoeur, L. _Histoire du Louvre_, Paris [n.d.]

Footnote 184:

See Pinkney, D. H., _Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris_,
Princeton, N.J., 1958. Work began on the extension of the Rue de
Rivoli in 1851; but it was only in 1853 that the Emperor found in
G.-E. Haussmann (1809-91), whom he made Prefect of the Seine and later
a baron, an adequate collaborator and executant for his tremendous
urbanistic programme.

Footnote 185:

A tour which can be taken vicariously is provided in a splendid set of
lithographs of the period, _Paris dans sa splendeur_; from this Plates
19 and 55B are taken.

Footnote 186:

The degree of control exercised by public authority over the façades
varied. For the extension of the Rue de Rivoli, continuation of
Percier & Fontaine’s original design was required; and for the Place
de l’Étoile and the Place de l’Opéra comprehensive designs established
in advance were enforced (see below). Elsewhere only the height of the
cornice line and the silhouette of the mansard were ordinarily
standardized by regulation.

Footnote 187:

Built in 1855 as the Hôtel des Chemins de Fer, but now the Hôtel du
Louvre, and the work of Hittorff, Rohault de Fleury, Armand, and
Pellechet. Hittorff and Rohault were also collaborating on the houses
surrounding the Place de l’Étoile at this time. T. L. Donaldson,
reporting on the new hotel at the Royal Institute of British
Architects on 22 June 1855, remarked: ‘The roof plays an important
part in the design ... much of the majesty of French buildings is
derived from these lofty roofs.’ Donaldson supervised the erection of
the Hope house, and had thus played a personal part in the
introduction of the French mansard into England six years earlier.

Footnote 188:

It is curious that there should be uncertainty about the authorship of
a complex so central to the building activity of its era. The Grand
Hotel which occupies the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens to the
left of the Opéra was by the team responsible for the Hôtel des
Chemins de Fer at the other end of the avenue (see Note [187]).
Pinkney in _Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris_, the latest to
discuss the subject, gives credit for all the façades around the Place
de l’Opéra to Rohault; Hautecoeur assigns the rounded pavilions
opposite the front of the Opéra to Blondel and mentions no other
architect. Whoever was responsible, Garnier felt they were much too
tall and confining for his Opéra.

Footnote 189:

See Garnier, J.-L.-C., _Le nouvel Opéra de Paris_, 2 vols text and 6
vols plates, Paris, 1875-81.

Footnote 190:

By this time Viollet-le-Duc was far more ‘Victorian’ than Garnier, yet
his secular work had become so eclectic and even original in detail as
hardly any longer to be Neo-Gothic at all (see Chapter 11.

Footnote 191:

See Daly, C., and Davioud, G.-J.-A., _Les théâtres de la Place du
Châtelet_, Paris, 1860.

Footnote 192:

See _Notice du Palais de Longchamps à Marseille_, Marseilles, 1872.

Footnote 193:

See Daly, C., _L’Architecture privée au XIX^e siècle ... sous Napoléon
III; nouvelles maisons de Paris et des environs_, 3 vols, Paris, 1864;
Calliat, V., _Parallèle des nouvelles maisons de Paris_, vol. II,
Paris, 1864; Adam, Leveil, and LeBlanc, _Recueil des maisons les plus
remarquables_, Paris, 1858; and _Maisons les plus remarquables de
Paris_, Paris, 1870. César Daly, as editor of the _Revue de
l’architecture_, also determined the character of the material that
periodical offered in this period.

Footnote 194:

It is awkward that the long career of Viollet-le-Duc, like that of
Semper, does not fall largely within any single chapter of this book.
Active from the forties until the seventies, leading restorer of
medieval monuments of his age in France, leading medieval
archaeologist of Europe, controversial reformer of French
architectural education (at least _in posse_), author of influential
critical books, he was the inspirer—by his writings rather than his
executed work—of a later generation of architectural innovators abroad
perhaps even more notably than at home. His failure to conform to the
normal pattern of architectural life that usually confines a
particular man’s significant activity within some one phase of
architectural development—such as, on the whole, each chapter of this
book deals with—makes it necessary to present his career in piecemeal
fashion. It is partly covered in Chapter 6, with a few further
mentions in this chapter, and—more significantly—in Chapter 11 in this
Part and Chapter 16 at the beginning of Part Three. It is worth noting
that Viollet-le-Duc is the only architect who enters this book in each
of its three parts, even though it is only as an influence, not an
executant, that he comes into the last part.

Footnote 195:

And some contemporaries were ready to say Sicilian! It was started—or
at least commissioned—some years before the first volume of the great
treatise on Syrian architecture appeared: Vogüé, C.-J.-M. de, _Syrie
Centrale_, 2 vols, Paris, 1865-77. But Vaudremer must have seen the
drawings of Kalat Seman published by Duthuit in the _Gazette des
architectes et du bâtiment_, 1864, No. 7, 79.

Footnote 196:

See Daumet, H., _Notice sur M. Abadie_, Paris, 1886. It is relevant
that Abadie became Diocesan Architect of Périgueux in 1874, the same
year he began the Sacré-Cœur, the competition for which he had won two
years earlier.

Footnote 197:

For characteristic French prize projects that were admired and
emulated abroad, see _Les grands prix de Rome d’architecture de
1850-1900_, Paris [n.d.]

Footnote 198:

For the Massachusetts institution, see Ware, W. R., _An Outline of a
Course of Architectural Instruction_, Boston, 1866; for Columbia, see
_idem_, ‘The Instruction in Architecture at the School of Mines’,
_School of Mines Quarterly_, X (1888), 28-43.

Footnote 199:

Yet one of the boldest modern architects of Latin America, Carlos Raúl
Villanueva (b. 1900) of Venezuela, was educated at the École des
Beaux-Arts itself; and most of the other modern architects in these
countries—those over forty at least—were trained in the local Escuelas
de Bellas Artes based on the Paris original.

Footnote 200:

The most conspicuous exception, dominating the whole city, is the Mole
Antonelliana. This extraordinary edifice, begun by Alessandro
Antonelli (1798-1880) in 1863, more than rivals his very tall earlier
dome on San Gaudenzio in Novara, designed in 1840. Never really
completed, the construction of the Mole continued intermittently down
to Antonelli’s death. By its great height and in some of the
technicalities of its construction it rivals the Eiffel Tower and the
early American skyscrapers which are posterior to it by several
decades. Yet Antonelli arrived at no coherent expression of his
structural innovations and, to judge from the successive purposes for
which the structure has been intended to serve or has served, no real
capacity to provide a functionally viable building. On the whole, as
its present name implies, this is a monument chiefly to its designer’s
megalomania.

Footnote 201:

See Reed, H. H., ‘Rome: The Third Sack’, _Architectural Review_, CVII
(1950), 91-110.

Footnote 202:

The third prominent edifice, surprisingly enough, is High Victorian
Gothic. St Paul’s, the American church, is by the English architect G.
E. Street, and its curious relation to the characteristic academic
blocks by Koch and his contemporaries can be appreciated on Plate 100
(see Chapter 11).

Footnote 203:

See Acciaresi, P., _Giuseppe Sacconi e l’opera sua massima_, Rome,
1911.

Footnote 204:

The best-maintained later equivalent in northern Europe is probably
the Passage, as it is called, in The Hague. Built in 1882-5, this
hardly rivals the Galleria Mazzini in Genoa in length and breadth,
much less Mengoni’s. There are many other examples, some of them
considerably later, but few are in good condition today, and none have
the scale of the three principal Italian examples. For earlier French
examples, see Chapter 3.

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