The Enlightenment
Reason and ancient ideals: Neoclassicism from Paris and Berlin to Washington.
The Enlightenment wanted reason in architecture too. The excavations at Pompeii and journeys to Greece revealed an antiquity that was simple and noble, and Neoclassicism took over Europe and North America – from revolutionary Paris and Schinkel’s Berlin to Jefferson’s Virginia, Gustav III’s Haga and Engel’s Helsinki.
Neoclassicism turned against the excess of the Baroque and Rococo and sought the straight lines of antiquity.
The excavations at Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) gave a new, more accurate picture of antiquity.
Antiquity became the model for museums, exchanges, churches, gateways and entire districts.
Laugier’s primitive hut and Boullée’s sphere show the idea that architecture should be built on simple basic forms.
Jefferson gave the new American republic Roman and Palladian forms.
The academies in Paris, London, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm trained the architects and set the rules.
The landscape park, with winding paths and small temples, replaced the straight gardens of the Baroque.
Schinkel in Berlin and Engel in Helsinki gave entire cities a classical face.
Napoleon’s Empire style took imperial Rome as its model, from Paris to St Petersburg and Stockholm.
Antiquity rediscovered. In the mid-18th century the picture of antiquity changed fundamentally. The excavations at Herculaneum from 1738 and at Pompeii from 1748 brought to light entire Roman towns with streets, houses, wall paintings and everyday objects. Suddenly it was possible to see how the people of antiquity had actually lived, not just how their temples looked as ruins. At the same time travellers began to make their way to the Greek temples at Paestum in southern Italy and on to Athens. The Englishmen James Stuart and Nicholas Revett surveyed the buildings of Athens and from 1762 published The Antiquities of Athens. The German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote of the Greeks' “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and made Greece the highest model for art. Antiquity became something to be studied closely and measured, not just a treasure chest from which to pick motifs. The result was an architecture of smooth wall surfaces, clear volumes, columns that genuinely bear loads and ornament taken directly from ancient prototypes: laurel wreaths, meander bands, palmettes and garlands. The asymmetrical shells and swirls of the Rococo soon came to be seen as old-fashioned and superficial.
Palladio in England. In England the turn towards classicism came early. As early as the 1710s and 1720s a circle around Lord Burlington turned against the Baroque and instead took the 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio and his villas as their model. Burlington's Chiswick House outside London, built around 1730, is a free interpretation of Palladio's Villa Rotonda: a square building with a dome and a temple front. Palladianism spread to the country's country houses and on to the British colonies in North America. In the 1760s and 1770s Robert Adam, who had studied the ruins in Rome and at Split, gave interiors a new lightness: delicate stucco in pale colours, oval rooms, niches and pilasters. His style can be seen at Syon House and Kedleston Hall. On the other side of the Atlantic Thomas Jefferson used classicism as an image of the new republic. The Virginia State Capitol, designed in the 1780s, is modelled on the Roman temple of the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, and his own Monticello and the University of Virginia draw on Palladio and antiquity. Here classicism became a political language: reason, order and civic virtue in stone and brick.
The architecture of revolution. In France the Jesuit Marc-Antoine Laugier wrote in 1753 that all architecture should start from the primitive hut: posts, beams and a pitched roof. The column should genuinely bear weight, not be decoration against a wall. The idea shaped Jacques-Germain Soufflot's church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, begun in the 1750s, with free-standing columns inside the church and a large dome. During the Revolution, in 1791, it was turned into the Panthéon, a mausoleum for the great men of the nation. Two architects pushed geometry further than anyone before them. Étienne-Louis Boullée designed, among other things, a cenotaph for Isaac Newton in 1784: a giant sphere in which the firmament would be visible through small holes in the shell. He built almost nothing, but his drawings have inspired architects ever since. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans in the 1770s, a semicircular industrial town with the director's house at its centre, and the toll houses around Paris in the 1780s, a few of which still stand. The hallmarks are pure cubes, cylinders and pyramids, heavy rusticated surfaces and an endeavour to let the form of a building express what it is for.
The Greek Revival. Around 1800 Greek antiquity became increasingly important. The Doric column, heavy and without a base, became a symbol of seriousness and primal authenticity. In Berlin Carl Gotthard Langhans built the Brandenburg Gate in 1788–1791, modelled on the Propylaea in Athens. In Munich Leo von Klenze designed the Glyptothek for King Ludwig's collection of antiquities, and outside Regensburg he built Walhalla, a German hall of fame in the form of a Greek temple high above the Danube. In London the British Museum, designed by Robert Smirke and built from the 1820s to the 1840s, was given a long Ionic colonnade facing the street. In the United States the Greek style became almost a national style: banks, courthouses, universities and plantation houses were given temple pediments, often executed in timber and painted white. The Greek Revival is easy to recognise: short, sturdy columns, low pediments, flat roofs and few but crisp ornaments. The style was bound up with the political mood of the time, including sympathy for the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s. At the same time people began to understand that the ancient temples had once been painted in strong colours, a discovery that long proved hard to accept.
Planned cities. The Enlightenment wanted to order cities too. In Bath in England John Wood the Elder and the Younger built housing as unified monuments: The Circus, a circle of terraced houses from the 1750s, and the Royal Crescent, a crescent of thirty houses with a shared colonnaded façade, built in 1767–1774. Behind the uniform façades were ordinary town houses, and the model of a terrace in the form of a palace spread throughout Britain. In Edinburgh James Craig won the competition for the New Town in 1766, a grid plan with straight streets and squares on the ridge north of the medieval city. In Lisbon the centre was destroyed by the earthquake of 1755. Under the Marquis of Pombal the Baixa district was rebuilt in a short time with straight streets, uniform façades and houses with an internal frame of crossed timber braces, intended to withstand future earthquakes. Components were mass-produced so that construction could proceed quickly. What these projects have in common is that the city was regarded as a whole that could be planned rationally: hygiene, traffic, fire safety and representation were weighed together. It is an idea that points ahead to the great town plans of the 19th century.
New buildings of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment created new institutions that needed buildings of their own: museums, libraries, academies of science, observatories, hospitals, theatres and exchanges. The British Museum was founded in 1753, and the Louvre opened as a public museum during the Revolution in 1793. In the Vatican the Museo Pio-Clementino was fitted out in the 1770s and 80s for the popes’ ancient sculpture. Theatres were built as free-standing monuments, such as La Scala in Milan of 1778 and the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux of 1780, with a portico of twelve Corinthian columns. Prisons and poorhouses, too, began to be planned on rational principles. In 1791 the philosopher Jeremy Bentham described his panopticon, a ring-shaped institution in which a guard at the centre could see every cell. What they have in common is the belief that properly designed buildings could make people healthier, wiser and better – an idea that lived on far into 20th-century architecture.
The academies. In the 18th century architecture became a profession with its own training. The French academy of architecture, founded in 1671, held lectures and competitions, and the winner of the Prix de Rome was sent to study antiquity on the spot in Rome. The Royal Academy in London was founded in 1768 and the Bauakademie in Berlin in 1799. Smaller countries built up their academies too: in Copenhagen C.F. Hansen was trained, who after the fires rebuilt the city’s cathedral and courthouse. The academies taught the orders, proportion and draughtsmanship from the same models, which is why Neoclassicism looks so similar from Lisbon to St Petersburg. Architects travelled too: on educational journeys to Italy and, after 1750, more and more often to Greece, where they measured the ancient buildings for publication. The system lived on in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which shaped architects from all over the world far into the 20th century.
The English park. In 18th-century England garden design turned against the straight avenues and clipped hedges of the Baroque. The landscape park was meant to look like nature, but an improved nature reminiscent of the idealised landscapes in Claude Lorrain's paintings. Winding paths, lakes with irregular shores, rolling lawns and free-standing clumps of trees replaced the axes. Small temples, grottoes, bridges and artificial ruins were placed so that the walker would be surprised by new views. To keep livestock out without fences interrupting the view, hidden ditches, ha-has, were dug. William Kent and later Lancelot “Capability” Brown were the leading designers, and Stowe and Stourhead are among the best-known examples. The park expressed a new relationship with nature and could also be read politically, as an image of English liberty in contrast to the geometry of French absolutism. The English park spread quickly to the Continent, from Wörlitz in Germany to Haga in Stockholm, and the pattern lives on in city parks to this day.
Soane and London. John Soane, the son of a bricklayer, became architect to the Bank of England in 1788 and worked on the bank for more than forty years. He built a sequence of banking halls with shallow domes and roof lights, in which classical forms were pared down to lines and surfaces; most were demolished in the 1920s and 30s. He rebuilt his own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a museum of architecture, filled with ancient fragments, casts and paintings, and with light falling in through lanterns, mirrors and shafts. An Act of Parliament of 1833 made the house a museum, and it is still arranged as he left it at his death in 1837. At the same time John Nash gave London Regent Street and the terraces around Regent’s Park, a planned district in white stucco, and Robert Smirke designed the British Museum with a front of Ionic columns. Soane shows that Neoclassicism could be personal and experimental, not merely correct.
Schinkel in Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) gave the Prussian capital a classical face after the Napoleonic Wars. The Neue Wache, a guardhouse of 1816–1818, is a compact cube with a Doric portico. The Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt, built in 1818–1821, arranges the theatre as a series of volumes with columns and pilasters. The Altes Museum on the Lustgarten, opened in 1830, has a long façade with eighteen Ionic columns and behind it a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. It was one of the first museums built to show art to the public. Schinkel also designed in the Gothic style, as in the brick-built Friedrichswerder Church, and he painted and created stage sets. His Bauakademie of the 1830s was a cubic brick building with a rational structure and windows in even rows, inspired by English factories he had seen on a study tour. It was damaged in the war and demolished in 1962. Schinkel's ability to combine classical discipline with practical good sense made him a model for architects throughout the Nordic countries and later also for modernists such as Mies van der Rohe.
Jefferson and the new republic. The young American republic wanted to show that it was the heir to the republics of antiquity. Thomas Jefferson, a self-taught architect who had lived in Paris as an envoy, designed the state capitol in Richmond, Virginia, on the model of the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, one of the first modern public buildings in the form of an ancient temple. He rebuilt his own house, Monticello, in stages over forty years on Palladian models, and he laid out the University of Virginia as an academic village around a lawn, with a rotunda after the Pantheon at one end. The capital, Washington, was planned from 1791 by the Frenchman Pierre L’Enfant, with broad avenues radiating from the Capitol and the President’s House, on the model of Baroque Versailles and Rome. In the 1820s and 30s the Greek Revival swept the country, and banks, courthouses, churches and plantation houses received Doric and Ionic temple fronts.
Empire. Napoleon took imperial Rome as the model for his own empire. The architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine shaped the style, and Paris received triumphal arches, the Vendôme column modelled on Trajan’s Column and the temple-shaped church of La Madeleine. Empire is characterised by heavy forms, dark mahogany, gilded mounts, laurel wreaths, eagles, swans and lion’s paws. The style followed Napoleon’s armies and alliances, but also his enemies. In St Petersburg Andrey Voronikhin built the Kazan Cathedral with a colonnade modelled on St Peter’s, and Carlo Rossi designed the General Staff Building with a huge arch towards Palace Square. Recognise the style by its large, light and rather bare volumes, heavy cornices, round-arched windows and furniture with smooth, glossy surfaces.