On the genius of architecture

History

Pergamon

01916599

of European

(93) E0118-K

Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 741-745, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/94 $7.00 + o.ocl

REVIEWS ON THE GENIUS OF ARCHITECTURE The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations, Nicolas Le Camus de Mtzitres (Paris, 1780), Introduction by Robin Middleton, trans. David Britt (Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, Santa Monica, CA: Texts and Documents Series, 1992), 223 pp., 28 halftones, $29.95 cloth, $34.50 foreign, $19.95 paper, $22.95 foreign, distributed by University of Chicago Press. WAYNE ANDERSEN This is a modern, up-to-date book by a practising architect and expert on building technology, but it is translated and visually designed to read and look like an antique. Why must we read Le Camus’ book in quaint English when he wrote in straight-forward, unaffected French? What is modem in an original must stay modem in any translation. Otherwise it is not a translation. Camus’ book was not a period-piece when published in 1780, so an accurate presentation of his text in English should not make it a period-piece in 1992. This text in English did not exist in 1780, so the Getty edition in English cannot be an historical reconstruction and should not display an effort to make it look like one. Even the title in English is a transmutationa stock title for a trade book made to look quaint. Properly translated, the title, Le gknie de I’architectur; ou, L’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations, should read The Genius of Architecture, with the subtitle l%e Analogy of this Art with Our Sensations. The ‘or’, in Britt’s translation, renders the title archaic, old-fashioned. But the title was not oldfashioned when Le Camus’ book was published. For a 1990s reader of this book in English why are such nouns as these capitalised throughout: art, architecture, apartment, ocean, painter, garden, philosopher, upholsterer, sleep? Because they are capitalized in the French original is not a just cause. Britt’s text is not a 1780s translation but a 1992 one! Had Britt been translating a German text, published even this past year, would he have capitalised every noun? It is pretentious and condescending to add quaintness and oddity to a text that is itself neither quaint nor odd. Why employ the metaphor ‘diamonds in their rude coverings’ rather than ‘diamonds in the rough’? Why ‘looking glass’ rather than ‘mirror’? Antiqueness is what the future layers on a text, like age on infancy and air pollution on public sculpture. Britt pulls up short in his Translator’s Note: ‘But how could I present the modern American or English reader with toilet?’ Easy enough, Monsieur Britt, if you are that fastidious, water-closet or WC would be just fine. In 1801, the author in the three-language Krafft and Ransonnette, Les plus belles maisons et hbtels construits a Paris (Reprint: Nordlingen: Verlag Dr. Alfons Uhl, 1992) had no problem deploying both

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‘English privy’ and ‘toilet’, nor did Michael Dennis in Court and Garden, From the French Hdtel to the City ofModern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Anyone sophisticated enough to read Le Camus knows that the French toilette has only to do with cleaning and refreshing one’s body. Even French cats font la toilette, which I must admit is a nicer way of saying it than ‘lick themselves clean’. Britt’s translation is nonethtless very good, sensitive to Camus’ text. Le Camus was not a style-writer. Britt withheld overlaying the French text with British literary style. Any translation of a dated technical text is also a transposition in word usage-in this case, terms of building technology, which Britt handles with skill. He translates bois as timber, which is technologically okay for Le Camus’ time, but he should not have augmented it to ‘large timber’, for in English all timber is large-lesser sized construction wood is ‘dimension lumber’. He delicately translates fumier as ‘dung’ rather than ‘manure’. Because I am a horseman, that offends me. His only gross mistranslation is surely just a mindslip: he translates crayon as ‘crayon’ rather than ‘pencil’; a pencil sharpened to a tine point back then, as today, was a symbol of the architect’s skill (see JeanJacques Lequeu, Des instruments ri Pusage du bon dessinateur, Paris, 1782). Le Camus’ volume is a handbook on hdtelplanning, from foyer to boudoir to stables, and a discourse on the decorous and sensual treatment of one room after the other: how to sequence, size, shape, and decorate rooms so the psychology of each space educes the appropriate sense of place. It is a treatise on taste but also on designing with common sense. Urban h&e/s were aggregates of apartments but could also be one-family residences with guest apartments-the site owned by a landlord but leased for life, as was the case of the one hbtel that Le Camus designed, the H&e2 de Beauvau at 96 Faubourg Saint-Honort (1768), today housing the Minis&e de I’lntkrieur. Le Camus’ professional life in Paris spanned the latter decades of the neoclassical eighteenth-century when attention to interiors moved seriously into the building-design process. The enhanced splendor of urban apartments, townhouses and mansions, generated interior design as a material issue of discussion and debate. Rooms had expanded in number, become more specialised, and called for unique design character. Drawn into architectural practice were ideas promulgated by sensationalists, the forerunners of environmental psychologists and neuro-scientists of the senses. On this subject, Le Camus may have written a text important enough to merit this republication. But the contents and way he organised them exposes, to me at least, that his venture into sensual aesthetics was a divergence, not his mainstream, as was his effort to write a literary piece, Aaba; ou, Le triomphe de /‘innocence (Paris, 1784), a novel on the love of Alba for Hilas. To his credit he devotes many pages to service rooms and staff quarters. His concern for a proper linen room is matched by concern that the stable’s oats bin be constructed with the health of horses in mind. Le Camus belonged to a class of architects who were not members of the elite society of architects. He was Architect expert bourgeois, a technical expert in principles of construction, a specialist in timber construction and fire-proofing. In those days before structural steel, wide spans could be made only with timbers and wood trusses, which were even then not adequately engineered and also subject to burning. His one famous project was the Halle aux blks, where now

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stands, reflecting the round wood-domed structure that burned in 1802, the Paris Bourse. Hale aux bfks is ineptly translated in this book as ‘The Corn Exchange’. Scholars with Latin words stuck in their craw cannot seem to say ‘wheat’, which was eighteenth-century France’s noblest cereal crop. I have even read Le Camus’ Hale called ‘The Corn Palace’ when everyone should know that the one and only Corn Palace was Sioux City, Iowa’s, built in 1887 and proclaimed by President Cleveland ‘the capital of the northwest’. In English, corn is not wheat. The sensationalist aspect of Le Camus’ career is the focus of Middleton’s long introduction. Here we encounter couture scholarship, couture history. For the Getty milieu, for the Society of Architectural Historians and those who savour antiquarian literature, this text is just right. And because I see the past up close while Middleton sees it through measured historical space and yellowed varnish-making us two of a very different kind-1 am privileged to disagree without being disrespectful. I admire his scholarship, while not agreeing with it. I would have preferred, for this particular book, the close focus of Middleton’s excellent essay on Guillaume-Abel Blouet, ‘Sickness, Madness and Crisis as the Grounds of Form’ in Annals of the Architectural Association 25 (Summer 1993). Middleton surveys the history of sensual taste, taking us on an aromatic mountain tour of Socrates, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, Vignola, Descartes, Ficino, Vitruvius, Alberti, da Vinci, Perrault, Le Brun, Bouffrand, De Piles and Boullee. The low mound of Le Camus’ accomplishments is lost in this range of lofty peaks. That the eighteenth-century writers on philosophical aspects of architecture cite ancient authors, or that Le Camus defers to Perrault, Le Brun, Sevendoni and Watelet, is not evidence of chain-linking in a sure historical sequence but of Le Camus’ desire to both fit and attach himself to the chain. To sustain prominence and secure a place in history, architects reflexively cite famous names as forbears. At a recent Harvard University convocation, Phillip Johnson, IM Pei, Paul Rudolf and Edward Barnes, paid homage to mentors Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, as if their connection-like from Socrates to Cicero, or Christopher Wren to Saarinen-were as primary as a non-stop flight from Rome to Tokyo. Of such umbilical connections, historians must take heed to not chart self-managed genealogies as true histories. Most creative thinkers, whose generative thoughts can come out of most anywhere, will fabricate history by famous-name citing when writing for posterity or to self-promote. Nucleonic chains of scholarship are also forged when the chaos of imagination and invention is sorted out and made episodic-the larger nuclei put in serial order and given the magnetic power of galactic cores that fashion stars from accumulated dust. Missing from Middleton’s survey is the proximate professional and economic environment of Le Camus’ work-what Middleton would call ‘second-hand’ knowledge, which was the knowledge of day-to-day practice, as if the only true knowledge is from primary sources found in a book. Missing also is any explanation why Le Camus hid his critique of elite domestic architecture at the end of his discourse on equestrian academy design. Only a guess was made as to why Le Camus was commissioned to plan the H&e/de Beauvau. Perhaps because the site was difficult is Middleton’s intimated reason. But more likely it was because the site was the illsituated kind that prominent architects shunned as a high-risk commission, like major international architects shunned La Dkfense during the badly planned first

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phase, dooming it, or why in the 1630s Roman architects passed over the cramped, awkward site of S. Carlo alk Quuttro Fonane, leaving it to Borromini, who had a lot to gain and nothing to lose. Even when Middleton gets to Le Camus’ floor plan for the ideal sequence of linked rooms, the reader is immediately diverted: first to mid-sixteenth-century Serlio’s description of a royal palace given in his sixth book of architecture, which wasn’t published until the twentieth-century. From this Renaissance description of an ideal room layout (that anyone who’s been in a one-bedroom apartment is familiar with), Middleton pushes us back to the fifteenth-century, to the H&e1 de C&my. From there to the medieval manor. Then, in a surprise reversal of Middleton’s top-down history patterned on Louis XIV’s rule and Le Brun’s authority, connecting Le Camus’ text to the palace at Versailles, we are carried way back, via Myra Nan Rosenfeld’s theory, to Roman farmsteads of France, thence to Ancient Rome. It would not take more than another sentence in Middleton’s tenacled text to reach Paleolithic caves in the Dordogne where the same functional arrangement of interior spaces-entry, vestibule, guardroom, salon, bedroom and water-closet-was most likely fashionable. The fact that Le Camus’ design for his mistress’ bathroom had the aspect of a grotto would then make historical sense along Middleton’s display-counter of noble history, for grottos housing spring-heads or steam-mouths were primordial wash-up rooms with toilets in perpetual flush. Everything in Middleton’s sort of architectural history hangs on bibliographical precedent and lineages. Nothing is permitted to depend on social and functional simila~ties of human need for shelter that, under similar social and climatic conditions, tends to generate similarities in housing, even for the elite. Wholly ignored are building-trade traditions and use of catalogue architectural elements that would make possible the entire construction of the H&e1 de Beauvau simply from the floor plan and specifications set down by Le Camus, with design-development and working-drawings done by the building contractor’s on-staff draftsmen. And the urbanising strategies, which made possible Le Camus’ Halle aux Blks, but also raised his rancor against speculator housing for the rich (town houses and grand apartments built without knowing who will occupy them), is not taken up, though it is critical to any understanding of Le Camus’ manual. Surely he wrote it to give builders of speculator housing guidance to general& dweller-needs in the deficiency of specific clients. His railing against speculator housing was most likely tacked on where he gives recommendations for designing an equestrian academy because putting it upfront would have handicapped his book. Anyway, Le Camus was naiive when it came to urban residential planning, when thinking that an aggregate of dwellings designed for specific occupants is a superior system to speculator housing. Great cities are not big villages that grew by single-unit accretion. Large functional projects, supported by government funding, such as the HaIle aux blks and Ledoux’s La saline of 1774, were planned as magnets to upscale neighbourhoods, to attract business and habitation, just as Paris today fulfils its promise to enhance life in ar~o~d~sse~ents that missed out on the 1960s boom by constructing urban magnets: the Pare de la Villette, the Part Citro&, the new bib~ioi~~~~e. All around these areas, speculative housing and new places of employment are being built; water, power, sewage and

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transportation systems improved. Cities raise tax revenues by upgrading neighbourhoods and relocating government offices in zones of high unemployment. Enhanced taxation supports city services and the construction and maintenance of places and monuments that attract tourists. Le Camus slipped into the crack between snobbish architects who worked for specific wealthy, well-connected clients and those of less-guarded self-esteem who designed for the ncuveaux riches-the clientele of the speculator. Around the HalIe aux blks and Ledoux’s saline plant, utopias of life and commerce were promoted: around Ledoux’s was La ville de Chaux; around Le Camus’, the Forum des halles and Saint-Eustache. Speculator housing for the nouveaux riches played a key role in the evolution of this admirable city. To such issues as I have referred, Middleton should have given some attention, rather than giving so much to the bedchamber of Louis XIV and the remote minds of Aristotle, Cicero and Leonardo da Vinci. Wayne Andersen Massachusetts

Institute of Technology