France's architectural legacy is rich
and important, reflecting the power and
personality of successive kings, the
Church and the state, vying to outdo
their peers with bold, lavish statements
in brick and stone. Many architectural
trends filtered into France from Italy -
Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque -
but they have been refined and developed
by the French. Rococo grew from Baroque,
Neoclassicism came from the Renaissance,
and Art Nouveau was a brilliant,
confused jumble of Baroque features
combined with the newly developed cast-iron
industry. Architecture this century has
produced two great names - Auguste
Perret and Le Corbusier - but France's
contemporary scene is still thriving,
with a host of new developments
throughout the country.
The Romans
The south of France was colonized by the
Romans by around 120 BC in order
to expand their trading operations, and
they set up substantial settlements at
Marseille, Narbonne, Orange, Arles,
Fréjus, Glanum near St-Rémy, and Nice,
with a network of roads linking them.
The Romans were fine town-planners,
linking complexes of buildings with
straight roads punctuated by decorative
fountains, arches and colonnades. They
built essentially in the Greek style,
and their large, functional buildings
were concerned more with strength and
solidity than aesthetic. A number of
substantial Roman building works survive:
in Nîmes you can see the Maison
Carrée, the best-preserved Roman temple
still standing, and the Temple of Diana,
one of just four vaulted Roman temples
in Europe. Gateways remain at Autun,
Orange, Saintes and Reims ,
and largely intact amphitheatres can be
seen at Nîmes and Arles . The
Pont du Gard aqueduct outside Nîmes
is still a magnificent and ageless
monument of civil engineering, built to
carry the town's fresh water over the
gorge, and Orange has its massive
theatre, with Europe's only intact Roman
façade. There are excavated
archeological sites at Glanum
near St-Rémy, Vienne, Vaison-la-Romaine
and Lyon .
Carolingian and Romanesque
The Carolingian dynasty of
Charlemagne attempted a revival of the
symbols of civilized authority by
recourse to Roman or " Romanesque
" models. Of this era, practically
nothing remains visible, though the
motifs of arch and vault are carried on
in their simplest forms, and the semi
circular apse and the basilican plan of
nave and aisles persist as the basis of
the succeeding phases of Christian
architecture. An interesting anomaly is
the plan of the church of St-Front
at Périgueux, a copy of St Mark's in
Venice, brought by trading influence
west along the Garonne in the early
twelfth century.
Elsewhere development may be divided
roughly north-south of the Loire.
Southern Romanesque is naturally more
Roman, with stone barrel vaults,
aisleless naves and domes. St-Trophime
at Arles (1150) has a porch directly
derived from Roman models and, with the
church at St-Gilles nearby, exhibits a
delight in carved ornament peculiar to
the south at this time. The cathedral at
Angoulême typifies the use of all
these elements.
The south, too, was the readiest
route for the introduction of new
cultural developments, and it is here
that the pointed arch and vault first
appear - from Spanish Muslim sources -
in churches such as Notre-Dame at
Avignon, the cathedral at Autun
and Ste-Madeleine at Vézelay
(1089-1206), which contains the earliest
pointed cross vault in France.
In the north of the country, the nave
with aisles is more usual, together with
the development of twin western towers
to mask the end of the aisles. The
Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen (1066-77)
is typical. It contains the elements
later developed as "Gothic", in piers,
pillars, buttresses, arcades, ribbed
vaults and spires. The best examples may
be found in Normandy, and it is from
here, with the introduction of the
pointed arch from the south, that the
Gothic style developed.
Gothic
The reasons behind the development of
the Gothic style lie in the
pursuit of sensations of the sublime; to
achieve great height without apparent
great weight would seem to imitate
religious ambition. Its development in
the north is partly due to the
availability of good building stone and
soft stone for carving, but perhaps more
to the growth of royal aspiration and
power based in the Île de France, which,
allied with the papacy, stimulated the
building of the great cathedrals
of Paris, Bourges, Chartres, Laon, Le
Mans, Reims and Amiens in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries.
The Gothic phase began with the
building of the choir of the abbey of
St-Denis near Paris in 1140, and ran
through to the end of the fifteenth
century. Architecturally, it encompasses
the development of wider, traceried
windows of coloured glass, filling the
wall spaces liberated by the refinement
of vertical structure; the "rose" or
wheel is an early and especially French
feature in window tracery. The glass at
Chartres shows better than anywhere the
concerted architectural effect of these
developments. Another distinctive
element is the flying buttress outside
the walls to resist the outward push of
the vaulting.
In the south, as at Albi and Angers,
the great churches are generally broader
and simpler in plan and external
appearance, with aisles often almost as
high as the nave. Many secular buildings
survive - some of the most notable in
their present form being the work of
Viollet-le-Duc, the pre-eminent
nineteenth-century restorer - and even
whole towns, for example Carcassonne
and Aigues Mortes; Avignon has
the bridge and the papal palace.
Castles, of necessity, lent
themselves less to the disappearing
walls of the Gothic style. The
Château de Pierrefonds , as restored
by Viollet, may be taken as typical. The
walls of many others disappeared by
force, not whim, as gunpowder made them
obsolete and a more settled and
subjugated order led to the development
of château-palaces, such as
Châteaudun (1441) and Blois .
The Château de Josselin in
Brittany is a marvellous example of the
smaller fortresses that became common
towards the end of the Gothic period. In
addition, a series of colonial
settlements, the bastides , or
fortified towns, of the English
occupation, remain in the Dordogne
region and are a refreshing antidote to
triumphal French bombast.
Renaissance
Quite early in the sixteenth century the
influence of the new style of the
Italian Renaissance began to
appear. Coupled with the persistence of
Gothic traditions and the necessity of
steep roofs and tall chimneys in the
French climate, it appears immediately "Frenchified"
rather than in its pure imported form.
The châteaux of kings and courtiers in
the area round Paris and in the Loire
valley, such as Blois, Chambord,
Chenonceau and Fontainebleau ,
exemplify this style, with their wholly
un-Italian concentration of interest on
the skyline and an elaboration of detail
in the facades at the expense of the
clear modelling of form. With the
passing of time, however, the style
became more purely classical. The Louvre
in Paris and the Château de Blois are
notable examples of the developing
classicism . The wing of the
Château de Blois containing the
famous staircase designed for François I
in 1515 shows the beginning of an
emphasis on horizontal lines and an
overlay of Italian motifs on a basically
Gothic form. The elevations, designed by
Mansart in 1635, though
distinctively French, are just as
typically classical.
The Louvre even more embodies
the whole history of the classical style
in France, having been worked over by
all the grand names of French
architecture from Lescot in the early
sixteenth century, via François Mansart
and Claude Perrault in the seventeenth,
to the later years of the nineteenth
century.
It is unfortunate that the
Renaissance style in France is chiefly
seen in such structures as the Louvre
and Versailles, which because of their
scale can scarcely be experienced as
buildings. That this is the case is
largely due to the developing despotism
and concentration of power under Louis
XIII and Louis XIV. But there was a
lighter side to this. François Mansart,
at Blois and Maisons Lafitte
(1640), shows a certain suavity and
elegance, which appears again in the
eighteenth century in the town houses of
the Rococo period, the generally
reticent exteriors of which belie the
vivacity and charm of the private life
within.
On the other hand, Claude Perrault
(1613-88), who designed the great
colonnaded east front of the Louvre,
gives an austere face to the official
architecture of despotism, magnificent
but far too imperial to be much enjoyed
by common mortals. The high-pitched
roofs, which had been almost universal
until then, are replaced here by the
classical balustrade and pediment, the
style grand but cold and supremely
secular. Art and architecture were at
the time organized by boards and
academies, and in the latter style and
employment were strictly controlled by
royal direction. Between 1643 and 1774
France was governed by two monarchs who
both ruled by the same maxim - absolute
power. With such a limitation of ideas
at the source of patronage, it is hardly
surprising that there was a certain
dullness to the era, at least in the
acknowledged monuments of French
architecture.
Baroque and Rococo
In a similar way to the preceding
century, the churches of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
have a coldness quite different from the
German and Flemish Baroque or the
Italian. When the Renaissance style
first appeared in the early sixteenth
century, there was no great need for new
church building, the country being so
well endowed from the Gothic centuries.
St-Étienne-du-Mont (1517-1620)
and St-Eustache (1532-89), both
in Paris, show how old forms persisted
with only an overlay of the new style.
It is with the Jesuits in the
seventeenth century that the Church
embraced the new style to combat the
forces of rational disbelief. In Paris
the churches of the Sorbonne
(1653) and Val-de-Grâce (1645)
exemplify this, as do a good number of
other grandiose churches in the
Baroque style, through Les
Invalides at the end of the
seventeenth century to the Panthéon
of the late eighteenth century. Here is
the Church triumphant, rather than the
state, but no more beguiling.
The architect of Les Invalides was
Jules Hardouin Mansart , a product
of the academy, who also greatly
extended the palace of Versailles
and so created the Cinemascope view of
France with that seemingly endless
horizon of royalty. As an antidote to
this pomposity, the Petit Trianon
at Versailles is as refreshing now as it
was to Louis XV, who had it built in
1762 as a place of escape for his
mistress. And even more so is this true
of that other pearl formed of the grit
of boredom in the enclosed world of
Versailles - La Petite Ferme,
where Marie-Antoinette played at being a
milkmaid, which epitomizes the Arcadian
and "picturesque" fantasy of the
painters Boucher and Fragonard.
The lightness and charm that was
undermining official grandeur with
Arcadian fancies and Rococo
decoration was, however, snuffed out by
the Revolution. There is no real
Revolutionary architecture, as the
necessity of order and authority soon
asserted itself and an autocracy every
bit as absolute returned with Napoléon,
drawing on the old grand manner but with
a stronger trace of the stern old Roman.
One architect, Claude Ledoux ,
was highly original and influential,
both in England and Germany. And the
visionary millennialist Boullée
could also be said to be a child of
Revolutionary times, though it is likely
that such men were inspired as much by
the rediscovered plainness of the Greek
Doric order as by radical politics.
In Paris it was not the democratic
Doric but the imperial Corinthian order
that re-emerged triumphant in the church
of the Madeleine (1806) and, with
the Arc de Triomphe like some
colossal paperweight, reimposed the
authority of academic architecture in
contrast to the fancy-dress architecture
of contemporary Regency England.
The nineteenth century
The restoration of legitimate monarchy
after the fall of Napoléon
stimulated a revival of interest in
older Gothic and early Renaissance
styles, which offered a symbol of
dynastic reassurance not only to the
state but also to the newly rich. So in
the private and commercial architecture
of the nineteenth century these earlier
styles predominate - in mine-owners'
villas and bankers' headquarters.
By the mid- nineteenth century
, a neo-Baroque strain had established
itself, a style exemplified by Charles
Garnier's Opéra in Paris
(1861-74), which, under the heading of
Second Empire and with its associations
of voluptuous good living, seductive
painting and general "ooh-la-la",
provides probably the most persistent
image of France among the non-French.
In addition to the correct, official
Classicism and the robust, exuberant and
commercial Baroque, there is a third
strand running through the nineteenth
century that was ultimately more
fruitful. The rational engineering
approach, embodied in the official
School of Roads and Bridges and
invigorated by the teaching of Viollet-le-Duc,
who reinterpreted Gothic style as pure
structure, led to the development of new
structural techniques out of which "modern"
architectural style was born. Iron was
the first significant new material,
often used in imitation of Gothic forms
and destined to be developed as an
individual architectural style in
America. In the Eiffel Tower
(1889), France set up a potent symbol of
things to come.
A more significantly French
development was in the use of reinforced
concrete towards the end of the century,
most notably by Auguste Perret ,
whose 1903 apartment house at 25 rue
Franklin, Paris 16e, turns the concrete
structure into a visible virtue and
breaks with conventional façades.
Changes in the patterns of work and
travel were making the need for new
urban planning very acute in such cities
as Paris. Perret and other modernists
were all for the high-rise buildings
that were going to better the haphazard
layouts in America by a rational
integration to new street systems. Some
of their designs for gigantic skyscraper
avenues and suburban rings now look like
totalitarian horror-movie sets. But it
was tradition, not charity, that blocked
their projects at the time.
The twentieth century
The greatest proponent of the super New
York scale, who also had genuine if
mistaken concern for how people lived,
was Le Corbusier , the most
famous twentieth-century French
architect. His stature may now appear
diminished by the ascendancy of a
blander style in concrete boxing, as
well as by the significant technical and
social failures of his buildings and his
total disregard for historic streets and
monuments.
But while his manifesto, Vers une
architecture moderne , sounds like a
call to arms for a new and revolutionary
movement, Le Corbusier should perhaps be
more fairly assessed as the original,
inimitable and highly individual artist
he undoubtedly was. You should try to
see some of his work - there's the
Cité Radieuse in Marseille and
plenty of examples in Paris - to make up
your own mind about the man largely
responsible for changing the face and
form of buildings throughout the world.
One respect in which Paris at the
turn of the century lagged behind
London, Glasgow, Chicago and New York
was in underground transport .
First proposed in the 1870s, it took
twenty years of furious debate before
the Paris métro was finally realized in
1900. The design of the entrances was as
controversial as every other aspect of
the system, but the first commission
went to Hector Guimard , renowned
for his variations on the then-current
fashion in style. The whirling metal
railings, Art Nouveau lettering and
bizarre antennae-like orange lamps were
his creation. Conservatives were less
amused when it came to sites such as the
Opéra: Charles Garnier ,
architect of that edifice, demanded
classical marble and bronze porticoes
for every station, and his line was
followed, on a less grandiose scale,
wherever the métro steps surfaced by a
major monument. Thus Guimard was out of
a job. Some of the early ones remain (
Place des Abbesses , 18e, is
one), as do some of the white-tiled
interiors, replaced after World War II
in central stations by bright paint with
matching seats and display cases.
Art Nouveau designs also found
their way onto buildings - the early
department stores in Paris are the best
example - but the new materials and
simple geometry of the modern or
International Style favoured the Art
Deco look; again, you're most likely
to come across them in the capital.
Skipping the miserable 1950s and
1960s buildings everywhere, France again
becomes one of the most exciting patrons
of international contemporary
architecture . The Centre
Beaubourg , by Renzo Piano
and Richard Rogers , derided,
adored and visited by millions,
maximizes space by putting the service
elements usually concealed in walls and
floors on the outside. The visible
ducts, cables and pipes are painted in
accordance with the colour code of
architectural plans. You might think the
whole thing is a professional in-joke,
but the Beaubourg is one of the great
contemporary buildings in western Europe
- for its originality, popularity and
practicality.
In housing , new styles and
forms are to be seen in city suburbs and
vacation resorts, many of them
disastrous and visually unappealing, but
interesting to look at when you don't
have to live there. The latest
state-funded projects confirm French
seriousness about innovative design:
just outside Poitiers is the postmodern
Futuroscope cinema and virtual
reality complex, and in Marseilles
there's William Alsop's mammoth seat of
regional government. Regional projects
include Nîmes' Carré d'Art Modern
Art museum by Sir Norman Foster,
characterized by its simple transparent
design. The Cathédrale d'Evry ,
masterminded by Swiss Mario Botta and
finished in 1995, is a huge cylindrical
red-brick tower which houses an art
centre, concert hall and cinema screen,
besides the religious accoutrements that
befit its function. Its roof is slanted
at 45 degrees to receive more light, and
is crowned by 24 trees emulating the
laurel wreaths of Roman emperors Hadrian
and Augustus. Its stained-glass window
is at the foot of the building and
symbolizes the roots of a tree.
President Mitterrand's " grands
travaux " project foregrounded a new
architectural era for Paris in the
1980s. He commissioned the Cité de la
Musique from Christian de
Fartzamparc as a finishing touch to the
Parc de la Villette complex which
was built under Giscard d'Estaing on the
site of an old abbatoir, and which also
houses the Cité de la Science and
Bernard Tschemi's 21 " folies "
of urban life. The Institut du Monde
Arabe , by Jean Nouvel - who also
did the Fondation Cartier building and
the 426-metre high, 100-storey Tour Sans
Fins in the Défense area - is made up of
metal and glass facades positioned to
emulate traditional Arabo-Islamic
motifs, with light-sensitive shutters
best admired in action on a sunny March
day with racing clouds. The " Grand
Louvre " project displaced the
Ministry of Finance into a huge new
building in Bercy, thus clearing the
Richelieu wing of the Louvre for museum
use, increasing exhibition space by 83
percent. Ieoh Ming Pei's glass
pyramid in the Cour Napoléon is now
loved by Parisians, and this new
entrance to the museum takes visitors
through the underground Carrousel du
Louvre and its boutiques. The Grande
Arche de la Défense , designed by
Von Spreckelsen is a square arch aligned
on the map and in mathematical
proportions with the Arc de Triomphe -
except that the former also has a
fibreglass cloud hung in the space under
the arch. Situated at the west of Paris,
it is emblematic of the new business
district - not quite the centre of
communication that Mitterrand had wanted
- housing 87,000 square metres of office
space. The Opéra Bastille by
Carlos Ott was designed to be a "modern
and popular" alternative to the Opéra
Garnier. Although the sound
unfortunately resonates, the crowds
still flock to see the performances.
The new Bibliothèque Nationale
in the 13e arrondissement fits in
extraordinarily well with the
surrounding tower blocks. Designed by
Dominique Perrault, it's a complex made
up of four corners, which represent four
open books. This apparently facile
design is made up for by the complexity
(and expense) of the detail. The
aluminium shutters are covered in rare
oukoumé reddish wood, which
contrasts with the grey ipé and
yellow doussié wood, to give the
impression from a distance that the
towers are bookshelves containing
different bound volumes. By the year
2001, it will house more than 350,000
books stored under the four and is
divided into separate sections for
academics and the general public. The
interior design is metallic and
wood-based, and the library is a shrine
to multimedia with excellent audiovisual
research capacities.
The country's ever-advancing
transport network has provided sites for
some of the most high-tech office
buildings with state-of-the-art
engineering in Europe, as at
Eurolille , the complex around
Lille's TGV station, and in Roissy
, around the Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
The TGV Lyon-Satolas station is
another typical 1990s creation, both
elegant and thrustingly optimistic.
The new European Parliament
building in Strasbourg, designed by the
Architecture Studio group, was finished
in 1997, and is a huge boomerang-shaped
structure with a glass dome and metal
tower. Most recently, the Stade de
France in St-Denis, near Paris, was
built to host many of the World Cup 98
matches, including, as it happened, the
French victory in the final. Meanwhile,
the futuristic Antigone housing
and commercial development in
Montpellier, laid out by Ricard Bofill
and inaugurated in 1984, continues to
grow, with the opening in autumn 2000 of
Paul Chemetov's new library building.
But the French are also very good at
preserving the past. Throughout the
country you'll see far older period
streets - medieval and Renaissance -
that look as though they've never been
touched. More often than not, the
restoration has been carried out by the
Maisons de Compagnonage , the old
craft guilds, which have maintained
traditional building skills, handing
them down as of old from master to
apprentice (and never to women), while
also taking on new industrial skills.
Above all, though, bear in mind the
extent and variety of architecture in
France and don't feel intimidated by the
established sights. If the empty
grandeur of the Loire châteaux is
oppressive, there are numerous smaller
country houses open to the public, and
such municipal buildings as the
Hôtels de Ville tend to offer some
charm or amusement, even in the smallest
towns.
It is also possible in France to
experience whole towns as consistent
places of architecture, not only
Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, Dinan and
Nancy, but villages off the main roads
in which time seems to have stopped long
ago. And, besides, from any hotel
bedroom you can simply delight in what
Le Corbusier called "the magnificent
play of forms seen in light", in the
movement of morning sunlight over
ordinary provincial tiles and chimneys
