法國大革命巨變下的建築師——拿破崙的建築師

Percy and Fontaine are trained in the Ancien Régime Their life will be a life spent across one of the most tumultuous periods not only in French history but I think in modern history too with the transition across the revolution and then the successive regimes Depending on how you want to count If you count Napoleon's 100 days in the first and the second restoration they probably lived through eight or nine radical changes of government But to put this against the backdrop of the incredibly tumultuous era through which they lived and how they figured out how to completely transform what they thought was their destiny We'll see in a moment to be architects to the crown to be architects of great public buildings and instead to be architects to a private clientele taken up at a certain moment by a flirtatious but very capricious future self-appointed emperor So here they are, these two friends, Percy and Fontaine in a caricature before the Louvre standing, as you can see, in front of some equipment We're not quite sure if it's the wrecking equipment that's creating some room in order to view the great facade of Claude Perrault or if it's construction material for what they are finally going to do at the Louvre As you can see, the worksite is designated as the museum So Percy and Fontaine really are the first crafters of one of the first modern museums of modern history The transformation of the Louvre Palace into the Louvre Museum A project begun actually under Louis XVI given a kind of imprimatur of the revolution and opened very triumphantly by Napoleon They would be absolutely indistinguishable in many ways, or indissociable for their entire careers In age, different by only two years Fontaine the Elder, born in 1762 You see him there on the left And of course, he is engraved because it is he who will enter into the academy who will become much more the trusted sidekick of numerous rulers through radical changes of French government from a middle-class family to the north of Paris although he recounts in his wonderful diary from his youth how he stole away from the village of Hulalam where he was born to walk to Paris in order to see the work of the students at the Academy of Architecture because he aspired to be an architect but he could only be away for about 48 hours So he snuck to Paris in his teens for the first time to see the whole infrastructure of becoming an architect Later on, we'll see him there in a moment He would encounter the two years younger Charles Percier born in 1764 from a working-class family So Percier is an extraordinary story because he comes from a working-class family He will begin his education at what was called the École Gratuite Royale des Saints which meant that this was a school that was free founded by the crown in the middle of the 18th century to really to train the draftsmen and the workers in the production of furniture And this was very much the career that the young working-class Percier was destined for Although he was such an extraordinary draftsman he managed to do a very unusual thing and to work his way from the Royal School of Free Drawing which was a school really for 12, 13, 14-year-olds who would just enter in to the woodworking furniture-making professions into the École des Beaux-Arts and to become an architect and actually to hang out with no one less than Napoleon and Josephine This is Percier once he has made that transition I want now to put these two friends If you want to go pay homage to them today the thing to do is to take a trip to Père Lachaise You can follow the signs initially for Jimi Hendrix But before you get there take a little left and you will find the tomb of three architects who had signed a pact when they were all at the French Academy in Rome We'll get them to Rome in just a moment Percier and Fontaine and the third of this trio a man named Bernier to do three things that they would study the antiquities together that they would form a lifetime friendship and association and then they would be buried together And so the tomb that was designed for the three of them and where the three of them rest today in the Père Lachaise was designed by Percier as a kind of fulfillment of this romantic friendship and professional association So that's a pilgrimage that you can make on your next trip to Paris Very recondite to get back to your hotel at night and say you've been to see the grave of Percier, Fontaine and Bernier And then of course the person you're having dinner with will say who was Bernier You don't know I don't have much Bernier here for you because Bernier drops out when it comes time to form a stock company around the publications Percier and Fontaine will emerge from the system of the academic prizes and I want here to show you the extent to which they are prepared for a career that they will not have in quite the ways that they could imagine it in what turned out to be the closing moments of the Ancien Régime of the reign of Louis XVI Here is, as you can see this drawing is too big to photograph by a mere mortal like Jean-Philippe or me This is a drawing probably the size of your largest tablecloth for a menagerie for a kind of royal zoo sort of imagination of recrafting part of the Palace of Versailles for the royal animals It goes to show the types of projects that were given to the students Now we have to imagine in 1783 that Percier is 19 years old So this is a drawing done by a 19-year-old hoping to win the Grand Prix and be sent at the Crown and the Academy's expense to Rome to refine his skills as an architect As you can see the aim was not only to learn the principles of composition but also the principles of rendering at the centerpiece of it this is that circular building that you see here was a kind of what would you call it? It was really an arena for the animals to perform tricks a kind of like a horse-riding place or other animals from the menagerie could be brought in to this Rome interiorized Roman Colosseum But this was the set of drawings that would win Percier the Grand Prix de Rome which he took coming out of the studio of a very important architect Antoine François Pierre where he had first met Fontaine The next year Fontaine entered the Grand Prix and came up with this project an absolutely extraordinary project for a sepulcher monument to the sovereigns of a great grand empire So here we are in 1785 Of course we see immediately four years before the revolution we think what kind of fantasy is this guy into? Doesn't he know it's all over? In four years No one knew that in 1785 This drawing is sometimes commented upon as a total fantasy project as though it was to glorify the French monarchy at a time when it was in deep trouble by imagining a royal memorial landscape cemetery But it is also, I think, important to know that one of the burning issues of the day was if the problems of disease in the French capital in Paris might partly be solved by abandoning the habit of burying people in church graveyards and creating cemeteries outside the city So this project is actually related to one of the central urban planning debates of the day even if it takes it to an absolutely almost pre-Roman fantasy But one of the most interesting things here is that in this absolutely dramatic drawing of pure forms of architecture this conic form for the central mausoleum for the royal family surrounded by a series of smaller cones this absolutely sublime uninterrupted colonnade of vast scale but also the depiction of it under a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning these atmospheric effects but also the notion that the forms of architecture might be formed as much by a knowledge of classical architecture as they would be by the effects of nature of light, of environment on creating form This is, of course, 150 years before Corbusier writes that architecture is the play of volumes in light and shade All of this got Fontaine into an enormous amount of trouble Although the competition jury recognized that this was really the finest project they were afraid that Fontaine's drawing skills were so violated the dry norms of the academy that to reward his genius would send a bad sign This is interesting because quite clearly the inspiration comes from one of the academicians themselves from Étienne-Louis Boullée and his private projects here imagining a sepulcher monument a cenotaph for Newton at exactly the same moment So the academy was in a very strange position because perhaps one of its most advanced and experimental teacher masters was trying in private to create an abstract architecture of pure form of a symbolic communication through abstraction rather than even through the classical orders that they were reluctant that the students adhere to Interestingly, Percier said if you're not going to give the prize to my best chum Fontaine I will split my prize with him and he will walk to Rome and we will split it together So determined were they to succeed But the following year Fontaine was successful and the two of them were able to join together This was Percier's winning project, 1786 and it takes up this notion of the study of antiquity to submit it to modern uses This is a project to house the academies of France So here the academy is going to judge a student So we're in 1786 That makes Percier now 22 years old A 22-year-old homework assignment, if you will to redesign the house of the academy who's judging the competition It's a little like end of architecture school Please redesign this school and the dean will decide whether you get a prize or not So here is Percier redesigning a project for the academies As you can see, he imagines a great meeting hall in the form of a pantheon What more would the academicians want than to think that they should take the place of the Roman form of all the gods And then inside a series of meeting chambers and courtyards for the various academies of France There were four academies So there were four sides to this composition But also the notion of a ability not only to plan a complex program a complex brief into a very clear pattern that has an absolute abstract beauty just as a plan, as diagram but also a gradation of spaces as one approached that assembly that would take over the idea of procession in the royal palace into the idea of a public building So this in the end was what the students were being taught by the end of the 18th century in the French academy how to take all of the lessons of classical antiquity and design public buildings that would elevate public functions buildings in the city to the level of something that had previously held for the crown, for private residences for palaces into the new problems of public buildings So this is the moment when the center of Paris is being transformed by the addition of the great building for the Royal Mint which was also the Academy of Metallurgy of the School of Medicine of the Church of Saint Geneviève on the left bank and of the Theater of the Odéon So this is a time when Paris and you can still see them today is being restructured by the idea of a grand public architecture and all of this is what is going to be the product of those who win the Grand Prix de Rome So think of it of all of the students who are studying architecture in any given year only one will get the Grand Prix So there is an architect who is designated to go and refine his talents because women don't come to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until the very end of the 19th century and to go to Rome in order to refine talents and to have a more profound knowledge of the models of antiquity but also with the near guarantee that the Grand Prix would bring with it important commissions when one came home This was designating the elite of architectural practice in France There are the finished elevations of Percier and you can see the extent to which he is in fact indebted to a project a fantasy project by his mentor one of his mentors, Boulay for the design of a museum in 1783 This is also important because it tells us that the period of the Enlightenment and the reign of Louis XVI were thinking about public function such as the creation of a public museum even before the revolutionary transformation of the Louvre Palace into a modern museum So five years in Rome That's what you get if you get the Grand Prix de Rome Even the American Academy today only gives you one So this was really quite a wonderful boondoggle If you are looking into the details of some of the plates of one of their publications that's brought together in this complete published works of Percier and Fontaine you will find a self-portrait of Percier here drawing in the gardens of the Villa Albani The Villa Albani itself was a very important site If any of you know the Villa Albani this is where Winckelmann wrote the history of ancient art This is where the Cardinal Albani created one of the great 18th century collections of antiquities and fragments and began to try to compose them into a history of art We might even say that it was at the Villa Albani that the modern discipline of the history of art was born And so it also shows us that this rather guy from a modest family in Paris had through the Royal Academy of Architecture gained entry into one of the most difficult tickets of admission to visit the private gardens and Villa of Albani and even to be able almost impossible even today to visit it to record it to draw the antique fragments that had been brought there into an extraordinary picturesque garden situation I find this print incredibly interesting and I think the book is very interesting in allowing you to peruse these prints and think about challenges to a certain number of received ways that we recount history Later on we'll see some images in a few minutes of the famous Malmaison that Percier and Fontaine created famous also for its picturesque gardens which are always said to be inspired by English gardens But here you can see the young Percier drawing in one of the great picturesque gardens of 18th century Rome His official assignment was to draw so carefully that he would be able to create an absolutely to the... I shouldn't say millimeter because we're going to see in a moment millimeters didn't exist when he created these drawings in 1788 He paid himself to erect a scaffolding to get up close and personal with Trajan's column and to record and measure every inch of its surface to send back to Paris as proof that he was in fact not just hanging out and drinking and going on picnics but was working hard to create archaeological evidence that could be used for modern buildings but also that could be deployed in what he did at night which was to create these absolutely fine wash drawings So here an elevation some of the details of the features of the capital But what is of particular interest I think to Percier here is the relationship between Roman engineering and the structure in that wonderful section of how the interior staircase rises through Trajan's column and of course as you all know the spiral of the decoration recounts the defeat of the Dacians the modern-day Romanians bringing them into the empire So this was an imperial monument being studied in what turns out to be the late monarchy but also a fascination with the role of relief at a larger scale up close to the spectator as Percier studies all of that as something that might have use for his future work as well as the lettering style of the ancient Romans that they will also want to adapt for modern use. Very poignant then that he has created what was immediately recognized as one of the finest achievements of the new demand that the students be collectively creating large-scale restoration drawings of the Roman antiquities for the use of modern France. So this translation from studying antiquity to creating modernity was at the very heart of the program of the Academy of Architecture was at the heart of the investment in these young men in sending them to the French Academy in Rome for five years. But how poignant that it should be in 1788 because of course one year later everything is going to change. It's not the only thing that they saw. They hung out in Piranesi's shop and bought drawing prints from him. Piranesi's shop was actually next to the French Academy in Rome in the Corso. They saw one of the rare works of Piranesi here working for the Knights of Malta in which one could think about the relationship of sculpture decoration and iconography, strange iconography in the case of Piranesi to the creation of public space into public squares. But also if one delves into the more private notebooks, it becomes clear that Percier and Fontaine as well, although here I'm showing you freer sketches by Percier. This is of the Renaissance façade of the Palazzo Venezia. That very important early pilastered and arcaded two-story loggia still exists. Today, although the rest of the context has changed, but he's interested in the picturesque, the irregular. And notice, too, the way that he records simultaneously a section with a view into the interior and an elevation in one rather free wash drawing. Or these, which are incredibly important because he studies these buildings that are not going to enter into... No one studied this in school. Vernacular buildings, the outbuildings, the farm buildings. He's as interested in the vernacular of the countryside. He's as interested in a building that signals the return of ancient Roman architecture to Renaissance Rome in that high-style loggia as he is in the use of the classical language of architecture in a completely anonymous subsidiary building of partially a brick. So many, many drawings I could show you. Here is Fontaine as well doing views of Rome. So we mustn't imagine it was only the antique monuments nor that it was even only the high-style monuments because here is Fontaine recording a view of the picturesque ensemble of the early Christian church of San Lorenzo outside the walls. All of this, 1776, 86, 87, 88, and, of course, the revolution in 1789, the events from Paris. Both Percier and Fontaine, in fact, will miss the dramatic events of 1789. They are not present when this happens, the taking of the Bastille prison on the 14th of July, 1789, even though only something like 14 prisoners in this debtor's prison were, in fact, released. Maybe we need a debtor's prison. Were released from the Bastille. It was a great symbol of tyranny. And, of course, they didn't see this. They don't return from Rome, either of them, until 1791. So they know most of what's going on. They watch the absolute evaporation and erosion of their career perspectives from afar. They're not going to work for the king. By the time they get back, there's even discussion that the king might not make it. A year after they get back, the king is beheaded. So it's not a good moment to take the knowledge that you had in school and hope for a job. Everything is changing. Nothing is going to be left the same. I like to put these together because, of course, class relations were changing with the idea of liberty, egality, fraternity, or else death. But also time and space were going to be changed by everything. Nothing is the same by the time they get back. The calendar has been changed. It's no longer going to be 1791. It's going to be the year one. Time starts over by numbering time from the beginning of the French Republic. The idea of the French provinces with all of their aristocratic connections were to be done away with. Instead, France was going to be divided up rationally to create the new departments and dissociate people from their old habits, from honor to aristocrats and the like. Unfortunately, as you can see in this drawing, which I love, which is a project for trying to create 89 departments commemorating 1789, was that the new invention of grid paper and the actual outline of the map of France don't really go together that well. So you can't actually get 89 perfectly square departments out of the... And then the meter. Even the way space is measured, the basic tool of the architect, the basic tool of designing, of putting together a building, of composing, was going to be changed by the end of the decade with the introduction of the metric system. So just to give you a sense of those radical changes, interestingly, not everything was immediately going to be a declaration of the new, because in the end, how would one create new art forms, new expressions, new forms of architecture? Tabula rasa for a society that was still hesitating. Louis XVI is still king, but what is going to be the relationship? Will there be a constitution? How is all of that going to work? And I like to show these because this is one of the last recorded plans of the Bastille prison. There is a folk image of the sans-culottes, the revolutionaries dismantling the Bastille. But what did they do with it? They immediately carved each one of those stones into a replica of the Bastille for sale as souvenirs And 89 of them are sent to the departmental headquarters for each of the new departments. So the whole debate that they come back to on what is the formal language, what will an architecture and an art of the revolution look like? Will it have references to classical antiquity? Will it emerge with the past? They miss the first great festival held for the Festival of Federation held on the Champ de Mars, the area in front of the École Militaire, still there as the Champ de Mars, which of course is a reference to the Roman war field, the field for military exercises. But that field for military exercises transformed into an instantaneous amphitheater for performances of new rituals of federation and of the connection of all French one to another as all of the people who attend the festival can come into these bleachers and look at one another. So the theatrics, the staging, the pageantry of the king taken over to republican uses. I think this is going to be very important for us because one thing that I want to emphasize is the extent to which Percier and Fontaine are going to become the pageant makers for the new reality and ultimately the great pageant makers for Napoleon with his rise through the consulate at the end of the revolutionary decade and finally in 1804 his declaration of himself as emperor. So another view of this festival of federation that they missed. A couple of other things that I think are too frequently forgotten. I was a student in Paris at the time of the bicentennial of the French revolution and I quickly went out to buy my one-volume paperback dictionary of the revolution and turned immediately to the entry architecture. Two sentences. It says, One knows in periods of political trouble that there are no opportunities for architects and therefore there is no revolutionary architecture. This is so unbelievably completely false because in fact what happened in the 1790s was the liberalization of all sorts of regulations and also we're going to see one of the biggest land transfers ever to take place in the history of France. So the liberalization of who could open and run a theater. So this is the Théâtre Fado, one of countless theaters a place for stage designers, a place where architects can become instant creators of scenery. So the Théâtre Fado, now gone and directed in 1791, survived for about 30 years, I believe, but one of many new theater buildings that emerged during the revolutionary decade. Another view of it. But what I want to underscore about this, and if you go looking for its site, you can find the surroundings for this Théâtre Fado. The Théâtre Fado was taking advantage of land that was sold from a confiscated ecclesiastical property of a monastery. And it was part of a real estate operation. So this is kind of like a cineplex. So somebody builds a cinema in order to bring people at night to buy clothes they don't need in a mall in New Jersey. This is the beginning of that idea. So you see that the theater anchors a street of shops, which you see here as the street of columns on the far left there. And there you see it also provides a slip entry into the theater itself. It's a very elegant detailing of the theater. Percier and Fontaine are not back in Paris at this point. So even the Percier and Fontaine style we need in the next stage of contextualizing it to think of in relationship to a radical change of conditions. This is a drawing by the young Prussian architect Frederic Gilly, the later teacher of Schinkel, of the street of columns, Rue des Colonnes, which is adjacent to the theater and still survives to this day. And it is probably the first organized form of building apartment houses with shops below and creating an image of the street as a Roman colonnaded or arcaded urbanism, but an urbanism built by real estate speculation. So the other thing that we have to see here is here these guys who go to Rome in order to become royal architects who come back to a situation of one of the great real estate speculative booms going on. Why? Because the property of the emigrated aristocrats and of the church has been expropriated as national goods and sold off in order to pay for what is going on. And this absolutely extraordinary new language of architecture, very abstract by inscribing in stone. Even one of the last projects of Ledoux, who will end up in prison about a year later, was this series of speculative houses called the Hoston Houses in what is today the Ninth Arrondissement near the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in which he tried to create a kind of high-density English garden city. You can see this kind of garden apartment with an English picturesque garden. Very successful, although it did not survive for more than about 30 years. So Percy and Fontaine can come back with all of this knowledge and what do they begin immediately to do? Not to draw really great buildings, but to create an incredible vocabulary essentially for decoration. They understand that not only is speculation going on, but the buildings are being subdivided. I mean, think of the great apartment houses in New York that are later chopped up. This is what's going on in Paris. Great hotels are being cut down into smaller spaces. There is, like any young architect in New York, much more work to be had renovating interiors than designing exteriors. This is the new reality for which Percy and Fontaine seek, largely through the first book that's included in the volume back there, with these extraordinary collages of everything they have seen in Rome, but put together now as absolutely seductive images rather than as designs to be copied. And along with it, these reminiscences of a very picturesque encounter with the Roman countryside and with fragments and spolia of Roman antiquity, because it is also a moment when the suburbs of Paris are emerging as a place to build secondary residencies. In fact, the revolution is like almost all moments of economic insecurity, a moment if you have some money to invest, invest it in land, invest it in building. And so, contrary to that dictionary, that stupid dictionary I bought in 1989, this is actually one of the great moments in French architecture, except it's all private, and it's not really recorded in monumental histories of architecture and furniture, of course. And they will begin working also with Jacob and with others designing furniture, both for their commissions, but most importantly, on the right for the seat of the convention, for the seat of an attempt at some form of representational government. This is a rather poorly chosen print, because it does not demonstrate the peacefulness of the first ever use of a Greek amphitheater for legislative assembly. It's from this room that we get the notions of the left and the right politically. The radical people who sat on the left, the conservative who served on the right, all of those terms come from the adaptation of the amphitheatrical form to an experiment in legislation. What should the architecture of the revolution look like? This was a problem for nearly everyone, although there was not a lot of state money to build public architecture. Public architecture had basically collapsed. There was the notion that the convention might finally be stabilized enough to do more than to renovate part of the Tuileries Palace to seat the legislators and might be able to build monumental buildings, might be able to symbolize itself, might be able to transform the physiognomy of Paris such that Paris would look not like a royal city but a republican city. Some of the most fantastic forms are this of Jean-Jacques Lequeux imagining a arc of the people, so this representation of the people on a triumphal arch rather than the triumphal arch for emperors or kings. This idea of how could you take the whole heritage of antiquity and turn it to a republican form. Here's a project for a monument in the honor of the republican armies who had protected French territory from foreign invasion in order to reseat the monarchy, although we're in 1795 here, after the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Then the opening in the year 2, 1794, for those of you who have not converted, of a series of competitions of what the architecture of the republic might look like. This is an entry by Percier and Fontaine, one of their first attempts to design a public architecture for the new reality. It is a monument to those who have defended the fatherland, les défenseurs de la patrie. Entered into this competition everyone knows nothing is going to be built. There's going to be an architectural exhibition, kind of the first architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, except not, because the École des Beaux-Arts had been abolished. As you can see, they imagine, for the first time, an architecture that is as much about inscribing names and memory of individual citizens. It's fascinating to think of this as about 200 years before the Vietnam War memorial, in which writing as well as a symbolic reworking of Roman imagery will become the constituents of their project. They're also going to be very active, and this is not terribly well known, although Jean-Philippe has begun to study these exquisite watercolors and gouaches in the Bibliothèque Nationale in the division of the opera of creating stage sets, and stage sets which also record the latest French voyages and studies of exotic lands. So let's then very briefly look at why did they become what Jean-Philippe here calls architects of the book, unable really to build an exterior. They built an incredible number of interiors, many of which will be recorded in their books, a way to make a career of the private public to publish their private work. That's why, if you look in the book, it's always apartment for Monsieur Y... or for Citoyenne, for Citizen L... We're not supposed to know whose house this is. There's a kind of architectural digest without the clients. So that is what you'll find if you go through their first book, which comes out, as you can see, in 1798. By that point, it's not so dangerous to use both systems. So it's year six of the French Republic, 1798, for the old fogies who haven't converted. Palaces, houses, and other modern buildings drawn in Rome. So not ancient Rome. We have a radical move here from showing antique knowledge to looking at modern Rome. Now, by modern Rome, they mean Renaissance Rome. The most interesting thing that they say, of course, here is the Palazzo Farnese, which by that point had been expropriated by the French and is today still a French property, but not exactly a model for the newfound wealth of the revolution. They do show that in exquisite watercolors that show its exterior spaces, its deployment of the classical language of architecture to create a rich series of spaces that are at least visible to the public here rendered in perspective, even if they cannot walk into the building. But what is really distinctive about this book is for the first time studying the smaller palaces, even palaces that look somewhere between large house and palace as possible models. And here, this is not the university club, but rather the Casa Turchi, photographed around 1880, but also recorded here. However, there exists in all of Italy and especially in Rome, a very large number of charming residences or residential buildings which have the most simple forms, and yet they are imprinted with genius, and they demonstrate an attentive artist, so on and so forth. And so here, what they're really saying is, you can turn to the more modest works of Rome. We're giving them to you. The economic situation has changed. People are going to be building smaller houses. Now I've thrown in two because Jean-Philippe didn't take this into practice. We don't have any freestanding buildings by Percy and Fontaine from the 1790s or from the immediate years after 1800. But here are two that are still standing. The Hotel Bourgogne on the left. I don't know how many of you have visited that in Paris. It's now open on selective days. It's a very rare survival of the empire period. And it's built in the courtyard of another building. So this creation of smaller houses inside the courtyards of more aristocratic buildings. And on the right, the country house of the architect Durand from about 1810, still standing in Taillet, which is today a working class suburb to the south of Paris. But you can see these very modest buildings, much smaller in scale. We have to take off the 1860s additions on the top of the Bourgogne on the left. So that's what's happening. This sudden explosion, very little recorded in our histories of architecture, but this is what that book is about, along with these extraordinary frontispieces of each part, which are a kind of fantasy. And it goes to the whole point of whether the so-called steel empire was translated as a linear style when, in fact, it's a coloristic style. It goes to another thing, if you're thinking for a moment. I'm showing you a book of 1798. This is the Orr Bible of the steel empire. The empire was declared in 1804. So what is called the steel empire is actually, and was called originally, the steel républicain, but it was appropriated by Napoleon. So Napoleon did not invent the empire style. Percier and Fontaine had, in a certain sense, commercialized it already for private clients, and it spread, particularly after Napoleon, throughout the Napoleonic occupied parts of Europe, and even further. We know copies came to America very quickly. One of Percier and Fontaine's pupils, Grandjean de Montigny, took it to Brazil. We can follow this style across the globe. So we have a whole tradition of the fantasy of fragments in drawings enters into the practice of the École des Beaux-Arts. We also have these extraordinary works in book illustrations by Percier and Fontaine here for a publication of the works of Horace, 1799. I wanted to show you this because this fascination with the garland and the bust, which becomes the language, again, looking up to this frieze, or one can think of any number of public buildings taking that over, but at the same time, imagining cityscapes in which buildings are not made up of the classical orders at all, but of a mural architecture, an architecture of walls, of a kind of abstraction, of a rhythm of opening and closing. So let's just quickly look at some images from it. This is the second book, by which point Percier and Fontaine have realized really much of their market is in the interior. And we might say that post Rococo they are the first figures who want to make their mark as much on architecture, even grand architecture, as they do on interior decoration. And in fact, Percier and Fontaine are extraordinary because they were as talented as interior designers and interior decorators as they were, as we'll see in my closing slides, of people who envisioned a whole new approach to planning the city. So this is the collection of interior decorations that includes everything you need to know in relationship to furnishing. And that goes on with everything you need to buy, from vases to tripods to candelabra, etc. Now, they tried it out first on themselves. As we know from this absolutely beautiful painting by Boilly of 1798, this is a group of artists. It includes portraits of Percier and Fontaine, among others. That is actually Fontaine with the bicorne hat at the very center of the composition. Getting together in the studio of the painter Isabey, which had been redesigned by Percier and Fontaine. Redesigned on a low budget. This is a low budget number. Everything is painted. Nothing is stucco. Nothing is carved. It's entirely a paint job. But a brilliant paint job that brings back all of the forms of Trajan's column, of the garlands. Everything that they had studied from monumental architecture now brought into a very delicate scale to the interior. Beautiful color schemes. This is really what gives us a sense of the palette of the operation of Percier and Fontaine in 1798. As well as when you get a hold of some of the plates that have been colored up. This is the... You can see how it's published as the lateral elevation of the studio of the painter. C, that means citizen. Citoyenne. I. Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. This is Isabeau's studio for copying and for consumption. This is the bedroom for Josephine. In fact, it was on the success... This is really interesting. On the success of what were basically bourgeois interiors that Josephine said, Hey, Napoleon, let's hire these guys that are really the hot number in Paris. We've got this new house. We're going to do it up on the cheap. They bought a little country retreat at Malmaison and they completely transformed it. They also published it and it is at this point that the style républicain and the style of the fashionable in revolutionary Paris becomes the language of Napoleon and his first wife, ultimately first empress, Josephine, at the estate at Malmaison, which you can visit today. Absolutely brilliant transformation of a relatively modest house into a triumphant celebration of the aspirations of Napoleon. It is here that he's going to return from his military campaigns. It's in this house that he will transform from being the first council to, in 1804, the emperor, by which point he takes over all the former royal residences in and around Paris and moves to a palatial scale. But this is a house that sort of mediates between the work for private citizens of the 1790s and the taking over in Percier and Fontaine as the official architects of the new empire. This is the library, which is a brilliant scheme. For those of you who are designers, the problem was there were two radiators that completely screwed up the scheme. So what Percier did was he said, we will incorporate those radiators into these aedicules and that will rhythm the space. It will also make Napoleon, who's a little bit short, look quite grand, framed along this long axis there. So a lot of problems of miniature scale and function were solved through this brilliant device. This made them sought after not only by the bourgeoisie but by other royal families. This is a room made of precious materials that was shipped to Spain for the court of the king of Spain. They begin creating largely ephemeral stage sets for the pageantry of empire. For military parades, for the giving out of the eagles, which were a prize given to the chiefs of the army, to the staging of the coronation of Napoleon, not at Reims, where the kings of France were coronated, but at Notre Dame in Paris, to ultimately the transformation of the center of Paris into a place for triumphal parades. Triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, with the idea that the armies would return to Paris and that it would have something of the grandeur, imagined grandeur of ancient Rome. This was actually, this is one of the only freestanding buildings designed by Percier and Fontaine for Napoleon still standing. This is today the triumphal arch of the Carousel. You all know it's standing inside the Louvre and now in dialogue with I. M. Pei's glass pyramid. This is actually not a triumphal arch in free space. It's largely misunderstood. It is the entry gate to the forecourt of the Tuileries Palace, which is no longer there. This is the demarcates moving from the Louvre, which is now a public museum, into the private residence of the emperor, but it is a very archaeologically accurate, if not one-to-one, reproduction of the famous arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum brought to Paris and beautifully. I want you, though, to pay attention to this because as much as people talk about it being a copy, it also deploys a rich variety of materials and it is as coloristic in its deployment of materials as any of the hand-colored plates. Their biggest project and one that we would, and I promise you we won't, we would need at least three hours to understand is the Louvre and the Tuileries designed to reconnect these two palaces. This is a detail from the famous Torgo isometric bird's-eye view of Paris from the middle of the 18th century with a population of something like 1,800 people living in between the Louvre and the Tuileries. The old dream is how to clear out this is urban renewal at its birth, how to clear out all of that area. Several churches to be, several parishes, goodbye, all these people move out and connect those two palaces into a great composition. This will not be completed until the second empire. And in many ways, I leave you with anything, we're going to go from the scale of designing for the private client to an urban vision hardly realized under Napoleon but would become one of the points of departure for his nephew, Napoleon III, and the transformation of Paris under Haussmann in the years 1852 to 1870. So here is their imagination for how they might unite those two palaces into a multi-courtyard complex which would not only be suitable of the grandeur of the empire. We're in 1813. Napoleon is at his high point here. He's not yet beat a defeat, the trail back from Moscow. Here is the project all cleared away. And this desire for a grand composition. The key for us to think about is one thing that they do leave for us in Paris, or probably for that matter, anywhere, and this is the creation of Rue de Rivoli. And here those two projects join. The project of working for the emperor and the project of the real estate boom. But how not to now respond to the real estate boom but actually to lead the real estate boom. As Percy and Fontaine design a model facade for an arcaded street of apartment houses that will provide a backdrop to the existing Tuileries Gardens, the royal gardens, which have been public park since 1782, and which will also transform the city fabric around the combined palace of the Tuileries and Louvre into something suitable for the emperor to look at out the window. And that is... So here we have the beginning of the destructions going on in order to create that street, a popular print of what it might look like. But most important for us is this street, despite what the textbooks tell you, was not built by Napoleon. All that Percy and Fontaine did was they drew up this contract drawing, and if you wanted to buy a property there and build, that's what you had to build. So this street was not built by Napoleon. It was built by several score investors who had to build that. And it's one of the incredible things that happens. Imperial Palace, Paris, is in a certain sense built by a manipulated private market to a design by Percy and Fontaine, a very austere design which, in fact, takes very little of their designs of the ornaments of Rome and the like into the creation of the city. I'll just show you one last slide. The last great project of Fontaine done without Percier, and I'll just show it to you here and encourage you on the next time you're in Paris to visit this under-visited absolute masterpiece of the late Percier and Fontaine, here, Fontaine more specifically, which is the Chapel Expiatoire, the expiatory chapel that was construction begun within days of Napoleon's exile to Elba in the first exile. Louis XVIII, who resumed the throne, who said brilliantly of Napoleon, he said, what are you going to do about the Tuileries? Napoleon's done so much work there with Percier and Fontaine. Are you going to throw it all out and rip out that décor and make the building look like Louis XVIII? And he said, no, it's all right. Napoleon was a very good tenant, so that could be kept. But the Percier and Fontaine were now to be redeployed to design an expiation monument to the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and to the Swiss Guard, all of whose remains had been thrown into common graves on this site. And so the creation of a place to expiate and try to heal the revolutionary decade. So I just leave you there because I think it's very poignant to think of these people who started out wanting to design for Louis XVI and for France of the 1780s and who will end their career with one of the finest of their creations, a monument to expiating the regicide of the French Revolution, having themselves lived through every one of the episodes in between. So I'll stop there. Thanks very much.