Functional Fantasy

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of all the aspects of 19th century culture to be rehabilitated, Beaux-Arts architecture was the last to come back. Art Nouveau glass is now more respectable than Renaissance majolica; the despised salon painters of the Third Empire are on show in the museums again. But it is still a surprise to find Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art displaying as its big architectural exhibition of the season a group of 200 renderings of designs and archaeological reconstructions by 19th century students at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The thrust of modern architectural education has been to annihilate the Beaux-Arts, to make it impossible to look with respect at the public style of French architecture between 1820 and 1900.

MOMA itself, as ark of the post-Bau-haus covenant, played no small part in this. The Beaux-Arts had to die so modernism might live. Its death was as necessary to the illusions of "functionalism" and "freedom" that developed around the glass-and-grid international style as the murdered Czar was to Stalin. The theologians of modern architecture, led by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, kept tearing into it with fury long after economics had killed it. Official 19th century buildings, we learned, were extravagances, inhumanly axial, prodigally wasteful and blind to the technology of their age. Unlike the Eiffel Tower and other "true" prophetic structures of the 19th century, they were the end of the line. Nothing could be developed from them. Less was more: and so the glass walls of Mies were supposed to symbolize freedom and democracy, whereas the richness of visual choice in Charles Garnier's design for the Paris Opera--or, for that matter, New York City's Grand Central Station--was thought indecent and dictatorial.

Massive Spaces. These pieties evaporate with time, especially when the international style is itself dead. But for the past decade at least, a Beaux-Arts influence has reasserted itself in architecture, mainly through the massive Roman spaces of the late Louis Kahn (TIME, Jan. 15, 1973). There is a renewed interest in the iconography of such buildings--in their spaces and ornament, and what they can tell about the utterly remote 19th century. The MOMA show, organized by Arthur Drexler, director of the museum's department of architecture and design, is the first guide to it in more than half a century. At last one is allowed to think about the Beaux-Arts again.

The student riots of May 1968 closed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for good. By then it scarcely mattered. But from 1819, when it rose from the wreckage of the royal academies, until 1900 it dominated world architecture. It gave no degrees, but to call oneself an ancien eleve de I'Ecole des Beaux-Arts counted for more than a degree. It was the school, and its power over taste was nearly absolute. Students were expected to do vast and elaborate reconstructions of classical buildings, brought to an incredible pitch of finish. There is probably not an architect alive who could equal the renderings of Edouard Loviot's Parthenon reconstruction of 1881 (see cut). One drawing in the show, by Jean-Camille Formige, is over 20 feet long--a railway station, shown down to the last shadow under the last rivet.

Such projects, though for "contemporary" buildings--bourses, railroad buildings and other temples of the new technocratic capitalism--have a curiously unreal air. They are paper architecture inhabiting imaginary space. How, one wonders, could they prepare a student for design in the real world? Yet they did, for the "real world" of 19th century French architecture was very different from today's. To us, architecture means anything built, from a cot tage to a town. But in France, l'architecture was the design of large public buildings, usually erected by the state.

New buildings were symbols of official ego, but also were intended as public dis play. They were designed for a self-confident bourgeoisie convinced it had inherited the earth. The decorations, the swags and massive vaults, the palatial baroque of the Beaux-Arts -- all conspired to suggest to those who used the buildings that, in Drexler's words, "they were the reason for the Republic."

Beaux-Arts design was various. Its major works run from the quiet classicism of Charles Percier's arcades along the Rue de Rivoli -- one of the stateliest parade grounds in the world -- to the exuberance of Garnier's Opera. But there was always a concern (surprising as it must sound after the years of propaganda) for functional clarity, and it shows in the superbly detailed drawings that make up the show at MOMA.

Ritual Movement. The plan ruled:

processional axes, broken by sudden revelations of mass and space. The pub lic, pronounced one Beaux-Arts professor, "need never ask the way in a good plan." Ideally, one was carried forward by the logic of the plan as, at a play, one was swept along by the plot. The buildings were meant to unfold. This feeling for ritual movement, the promenade, would almost disappear from architecture in the 20th century; and yet it was functional. Gamier was one of the last to recognize that fantasy and ceremonial had valid roles in secular architecture. People did not just go to the opera to see performance; they went to enjoy a ritual called "going to the opera." In the Paris Opera, Gamier enshrined that ritual. "How large should the foyer be?" he enquired in a book, Le Theatre, written four years before the Opera opened in 1875. "To answer this question we must study how people promenade ..." What person, trapped in our landscape of grids, would not feel a secret nostalgia at those considerate words?

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