Beaux-Arts architecture

Beaux-Arts architectureThe phrase Beaux Arts is usually translated as "Fine Arts" in non-architectural English contexts. denotes the academic classical architectural style that was taught at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, the home territory of this style. The style "Beaux-Arts" is above all the cumulative product of two and a half centuries of instruction under the authority, first of the Académie royale d'architecture, then, following the Revolution, of the Architecture section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The organization under the Ancien Régime of the competition for the Grand Prix de Rome in architecture, offering a chance to study in Rome, imprinted its codes and esthetic on the course of instruction, which culminated during the Second Empire (1850-1870) and the Third Republic that followed. The style of instruction that produced Beaux-Arts architecture continued without a major renovation until 1968.

Beaux-Arts training

Beaux-Arts architecture depended on sculptural decoration along conservative modern lines, employing French and Italian Baroque and Rococo formulas combined with an impressionistic finish and realism. In the facade below, Diana grasps the cornice she sits on in a natural action that is typical of Beaux-Arts integration of sculpture with architecture. Slightly overscaled details, bold scuptural supporting consoles, rich deep cornices, swags and sculptural enrichments in the most bravura finish the client could afford gave employment to several generations of architectural modellers and carvers of Italian and Central European backgrounds. A sense of appropriate idiom at the craftsman level supported the design teams of the first truly modern architectural offices.

Some aspects of Beaux-Arts approach could degenerate into mannerisms. Beaux-Arts training made great use of agrafes, clasps that links one architectual detail to another; to interpenetration of forms, a Baroque habit; to "speaking architecture" (architecture parlante) in which supposed appropriateness of symbolism could be taken to literal-minded extremes. Beaux-Arts training emphasized the production of quick conceptual sketches, highly-finished perspective presentation drawings, close attention to the program, and knowledgeable detailing. Site considerations tended towards social and urbane contexts.

Characteristics of Beaux-Arts style

Though Beaux-Arts style embodies an approach to a regenerated spirit within the grand traditions rather than a set of motifs, the principal characteristics of Beaux-Arts architecture may be summarized:

Symmetry.
Hierarchy of spaces, from "noble spaces"—grand entrances and staircases— to utilitarian ones
More or less explicit references to a synthesis of historicist styles and a tendency to eclecticism. An architect was expected to work fluently in a number of "manners", following the requirements of the client and the architectural program.
Precision in design and execution of a profusion of architectural details: balustrades, pilasters, panels of bas-relief, figure sculpture, garlands, cartouches, with a prominent display of richly detailed clasps (agrafes) brackets and supporting consoles.
Subtle use of polychromy

At the eve of World War I, the style began to find major competitors among the architects of Modernism and the nascent International Style. The prestige of the École gave the style "Beaux-Arts" a second wind in compromising the new manner with the traditional training. All architects-in-training passed through the obligatory stages, studying antique models, constructing analos, analyses reproducing Greek or Roman models, "pocket" studies and other conventional steps in the long competition for the few desirable places at the Académie de France à Rome (housed in the Villa Medici) with traditional requirements of sending at intervals the presentation drawings called envois de Rome.

French Beaux-Arts architecture

Paris :

École des Beaux-Arts
LeFuel wings of the Louvre
Opéra Garnier.
Palais du Trocadéro.
Gare d'Orsay.
Grand Palais, Petit Palais and the Pont Alexandre III.
Palais de Chaillot.

American Beaux-Arts architecture

The first American architect to attend the École des Beaux-Arts was Richard Morris Hunt, followed by Charles Follen McKim. They were followed by an entire generation. Henry Hobson Richardson absorbed Beaux-Arts lessons in massing and spatial planning, then applied them to Romanesque architectural models that were not characteristic of the Beaux-Arts repertory. His Beaux-Arts training taught him to transcend slavish copying and recreate in the essential, fully digested and idiomatic manner of his models. Richardson evolved a highly personal style (Richardsonian Romanesque) freed of historicism that was influential in early Modernism.

The "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago was a triumph of the movement and a major impetus for the short-lived City Beautiful movement in the United States. Beaux-Arts city planning, with its Baroque insistence on vistas punctuated by symmetry, eye-catching monuments, axial avenues, uniform cornice heights, a harmonious "ensemble" and a somewhat theatrical nobility and accessible charm, embraced ideals that the ensuing Modernist movement decried or just dismissed. Beaux-Arts architecture, in spite of its insistence on exterior symmetry, was generally user-friendly. It embodied more sophisticated patterns of circulation and differentiated usage than its modernist critics allowed. Grand entrance and stairway sequences, borrowed from Baroque palace designs, had functional clarity: though visitors were impressed, they were rarely trapped or disoriented by ambiguities.

The Beaux-Arts style was also flexible. Steel-frame construction and other modern innovations in engineering techniques and materials, like structural Guastavino tile, were embraced by Beaux-Arts trained designers: splendid examples are provided by a string of Beaux-Arts urban railroad stations that combined many of these features within a triumphalist civic presentation. (Chicago's Union Station is a famous American example of this style.) Two of the best American examples of the Beaux-Arts tradition stand within a few blocks of each other: Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library.

American architects working in the Beaux-Arts style

The following individuals were seminal in the assimilation of the Beaux-Arts style in the US:

Notes

External links

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