Commentary : Leon Vaudoyer - Historicism in the age of industry

Leon Vaudoyer - Historicism in the age of industry.

It is interesting to see how political and ideological rivalries in the period of Bourbon Restoration, find their equivalence in architectural history, between the Romantic historicists and the conservative doctrinal neo-classicist. Vaudoyer and the Pensionnaires’ anti-establishment attitude and the increasingly defiant nature of their annual envois that increasingly challenge restrictions imposed by the academy in Paris, could be seen almost as an intellectual version of the 1830 French revolution that removed King Charles X from his throne.

Labrouster, Duc, Vaudoyer and Duban’s defiant annual Envoi from 1825-1830 resembles an intellectual coup in the making, precipitating in the Pasetrum incident and eventually culminating in Vaudoyer’s lowering of his “mark entirely for a moment of direct attack on contemporary design”.

Although Quatremère wasn’t put on the Guillotine or exiled to Gorizia as did Charles X of France, his authority along with that of the elders of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts was put into question towards the 1930s, as students in Paris greeted the academy’s meeting on October 1831 with “whistling from many…unleashed by the announcement of the laureates in the architectural competition…”.

Quatremère’s oration against innovation and originality in the fine arts, delivered before the students in the Academy in 1829 poses an uncanny resemblance to the Anti-Sacrilege act passed under King Charles X reign which eventually lead to its demise and the July revolution.

The intellectual rivalry that precipitated in the “coup”, is in many ways analogous to the French political struggles in the 1920s, particularly after Charles X succeeded Louis the XVIII as King of France. Quatremère De Quincy’s doctrinal approach to antiquity and the classical differed so radically from those of the emerging new generation of French intellectuals - as represented by the Pensionnaires and Horace Vernet - that reconciliation between the two was hardly possible. As Bergdoll pointed out, for Quatremère and the conservative neo-classicist, the intents of historical surveys of ancient antiquity and the classical were rooted in an adamant epistemological search for the precise “ideal proportion”.

In Quatremère’s perspective, the entire point of sending Pensionnaires to the villa of Medici to study ancient architecture in Rome was to nurture the Pensionnaires’ mastery of classical ideals, which by Quatremère’s ideology, should be celebrated and imitated by modern architecture as closely as possible. Vaudoyer and the Pensionnaires’ epistemological approach however turned the neo-classicist’s pedagogy on its head. Vaudoyer and the Pensionnaires embraced and delighted in the “deviations and adaptations to contextual purposes, demands and situations.” Precisely, Vaudoyer turned the annual envoi project into an archaeological comparative study that intend to uncover the contextual and historicist side of classical architecture. As Bergdoll pointed out, Vaudoyer avoided any canonic choice in framing his comparative study; “Rather he cultivated the irregular, the unusual, the oddly situated that he might better observe the interactions between a formal type and new demands and situations.”

From Vaudoyer and the Pensionnaires’ point of view, Quatremère doctrinal neo-classicism could no longer live up to the architectural demands of contemporary society and modes of production.

Doctrinal imitation of the ancients that resulted in static knowledge was a dead end, while innovative adaptation to contemporary and contextual demands became the necessary way forward. Seen from this perspective, the clash between the Pensionnaires and the academy was as much a matchup in architectural ideals as it was an inescapable clash between two successive generations.