THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
Artistic forms are not to be played with: life is to be recreated so that it will of necessity express itself as a pattern……
INDTRODUCTION
§ Since the 17th century architecture has been approached from four fundamentally different points of view
1. The academic architect
2. The craftsman builders
3. The civil engineer and
4. Other technological experts
and more in the recent years, the social scientist.
The architectural designs made annually at the ecole des beaux arts in Paris for two and half centuries before 1968 by competitors for the grand prix de Rome are of particular importance for the history of architecture because they constitute so complex and extreme and expression of one of these basic approaches, namely that of academic architect.
§ Four basically different kinds of training for the young architect have developed. These may similarly be characterized as the
1. Academic
2. The craft
3. The technological, and
4. The sociological.
§ It is this system of architectural education, the character of official architecture in France from the 17th century to our own time and was most completely and clearly reflected in the design made for the prix de Rome.
THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
§ Academic tradition: Source from the classical antiquity, especially to roman architecture and classical “idealism” in philosophy, the more immediate sources lay in Italian art and art theory of the high renaissance and baroque.
§ The heir of Academie Royale.
§ Recommendation for a new school of architecture should be joined with the new school of painting and sculpture.
§ French revolution: Napoleon
§ A new school of architecture under revolution.
§ Attack on the notion of the primitive hut occupies, jettison the link with nature.
§ By altering the ideas of the Greeks and of Vitruvius later architects had sometimes improved upon them as long as the general classic “rules” were not violated.
T.S ELIOT “the fixity of the intellectual structure, and the reduction of the past, puts me in the mind of an aphorism, tradition, cant’ simply be inherited it must be labored for. You can’t approach it without a historical sense: and a historical sense means that you appreciate the pastness of the past as well as its presence”.
THE PROGRAMMES :1810-1914
§ Monthly architectural competitions both in form of
Esquisses: sketch design
Project rendus: rendering
§ The competitions written by the professors of architectural theory were practical and relevant to the Grand Prix Projects.
§ About twenty subjects were set per year. There were more than five hundred different programmes. Where baths, schools and monuments were the subjects repeated often.
§ Industrial architecture was not the concern of the Ecole.
§ The greater part of the programmes set for the student can be divided, roughly into
Public buildings or buildings to be used by the public
Ecclesiastical buildings (variety of churches)
Private buildings
THE COMPETITION FOR THE GRAND PRIX IN 1824
§ The competition was the final hurdle in the education of the 19th century French architect, which awarded the highest possible achievement for a student and virtually ensured a prestigious career.
§ The theory and design manifested derived mainly from literary and artistic sources of the Italian Renaissance, exemplified a beauty of form based on fixed principles of taste.
§ The competition was traditionally entered by advanced students of French citizenship to prepare designs for large architectural projects, customarily for some kind monumental building with royal state or civic connotations, which were basically excursive of imagination.
§ Criticized as “paper architecture”.
§ The drawings were plans, sections, and elevations and later perspective views to be presented in an allotted square feet of area.
§ First to conceive the general project of a building then to study its principal parts and finally its details. This approach is different from a “romantic” where the designer will start out with some a detail that struck his fancy or utilitarian “functional” point of view with the answer to a problem of utility, structure, or economy.
§ Absence of visually “realistic” approach to architectural design because the academic point of view had its philosophical basis in classical “idealism”.
§ These drawings are ”idealized” abstractions of the “real” world of nature and the senses, inasmuch as they do depict architecture “realistically” as it appears to the eye of the beholder
PRINCIPLES AND METHODS ILLUSTRATED
§ Theory of Design
§ Character
GENERAL CHARACTER
TYPE CHARACTER
SPECIFIC CHARACTER
Transition between type character and specific character was what became known as “narrative architecture”
§ Programs
All the characteristics of the early Prairie houses were here: strong horizontal planes and masses, open interiors, bold cantilevers, and a strong attachment to the earth. Visually, this brick structure was a series of exciting planes, suggestive of a ship at sea. In its urban setting, it became one of the most celebrated residences in modern architecture.
All the characteristics of the early Prairie houses were here: strong horizontal planes and masses, open interiors, bold cantilevers, and a strong attachment to the earth. Visually, this brick structure was a series of exciting planes, suggestive of a ship at sea. In its urban setting, it became one of the most celebrated residences in modern architecture.
