THE NEW MATERIAL-

9 BASED REALISM
OF NINETEENTH-
CENTURY THEORY
AND PRACTICE
Neil Levine

In The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), one of the most
important theoretical texts of the first half of the nineteenth century, Augustus
Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52) deviated almost immediately from his main
argument for the virtues of Gothic architecture to criticize at length the conven-
tional belief in the wooden origins of classical masonry forms in the primitive
hut set forth by the ancient Roman engineer and author Vitruvius and his long line
of commentators.1 One might well ask why. The answer reveals a way of thinking
about nineteenth-century architecture more consistent with and true to its inten-
tions and achievements than the usual discussion of historical revivalism.
Nineteenth-century architecture has most often been considered pejoratively as
a kind of aesthetic wasteland, an interregnum between the neoclassicism of the
previous century that traced its origins directly back to the Renaissance and the
modern movement that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in large
part by disowning the immediate past and jettisoning its historicist baggage. The
“problem” of the nineteenth century was diagnosed as a kind of schizophrenia by
Sigfried Giedion and others. On the one hand were the new materials of iron and
reinforced concrete and on the other the historical forms that clothed them. The
forms themselves were most commonly drawn from multiple and often conflicting
earlier styles and eclectically combined or even juxtaposed. The elaborate decora-
tive finishes were not only interpreted as inconsistent with the underlying structure
but merely applied after the fact. Giedion described the disease of the century as a

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume III, Nineteenth-Century Architecture.

Edited by Martin Bressani and Christina Contandriopoulos.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Figure 9.1 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Church of Sainte-Geneviève (now the Panthéon),

Paris, 1755–90, on right, with Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1838–50/1,
in background. Credit: Author.

split between thought and feeling, or reason and emotion, a split that expressed
itself architecturally in the division between construction and decoration.2
The reliance of neoclassical theory on the model of the primitive hut, either as
radically presented by Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–69) in his Essai sur l’architecture
(1753) or more conventionally by William Chambers (1723–96) in his Treatise on
Civil Architecture (1759), secured for architectural design an imitative basis consist-
ent with that of painting and sculpture.3 When the wooden forms of the hut were
transmuted into stone to become the various parts of the classical orders, the imi-
tation, as in the other figural arts, was understood as a change in material from an
impermanent to a permanent one. Through this process of idealization, the
masonry forms of the classical temple front, for example, achieved a fictive, illu-
sionistic character in which not only did one material appear to simulate another
but its very form came to stand for, which is to say represent, another.
The representational character of classical architecture provided a rhetorical dis-
play that turned the beholder into a kind of a theatergoer compelled to trust in the
verisimilitude of the representation. In the Parisian Church of Sainte-Geneviève by
Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1755–90), the representational appearance was based on
a system of trabeated construction that had nothing to do with the underlying arc-
uated support that had to be reinforced by hidden iron cramps and ties (Figures 9.1
and 9.2). The illusionistic unity of the image was fundamentally a decorative one by
which the distinction between material support and appearance was denied. Con-
sistent with classical theory’s equation of “decoration” with what we today call
 The New Material-Based Realism 3

Figure 9.2 Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Pediment. Section, showing details of iron

reinforcement, by Jean Rondelet. From J. Rondelet, Mémoire sur le dôme du Panthéon
français (Paris: du Pont, 1797).

architectural design, such a procedure could be described most accurately as the

construction of decoration. This is precisely how Pugin described classical architec-
ture and why he initially focused on the theory of its origins in the wooden prim-
itive hut. It cleared the way to explaining how a different approach to managing the
relationship between construction and decoration could be achieved in a new,
materially-grounded way. Representation would soon be replaced by a concrete,
realistic form of presentation. This chapter will investigate this through the writ-
ings and buildings of Pugin and his French counterpart Henri Labrouste (1801–75),
arguably the two most influential architects of the second quarter of the century.

Pugin was a brilliant polemicist. This was already abundantly clear in his first major
publication, Contrasts: or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay
of Taste (1836/1841). The book contains a series of plates pairing richly decorated
medieval buildings with mean-looking contemporary ones, including the leading
English neoclassicist Soane’s own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.4 Such comparisons
were meant to show the degree to which the classical system of representation had
4 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

lost vitality and conviction due to the period’s lack of faith in the illusionistic power
of the decorative construct of the classical orders.
Although much of Pugin’s later writing concerned the intimate relationship
between the Catholic faith, to which he had converted, and its expression in Gothic,
or what he more often called “Pointed or Christian,” architecture, The True Prin-
ciples of Pointed or Christian Architecture, which followed directly from Contrasts,
speaks explicitly to the more general issues of how to reformulate architectural
design on a more realistic basis and why Gothic architecture was the proper model
for this. The True Principles begins straightaway with the following declaration,
italicized for emphasis:

The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a
building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd, that all
ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building. The
neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.
Architectural features are continually tacked on buildings with which they have no
connection, merely for the sake of what is termed effect.5

If Pugin had stopped here, one might confuse his position with that of the neoclas-
sicist Laugier, who had also demanded that the necessary and the essential be the
ruling factors in design.6 But as Pugin’s text continues, it immediately becomes
apparent that his definition of “the essential construction of the building” was totally
different from the neoclassical one in that it was the real construction Pugin had in
mind, not an ideal one.
Pugin’s argument involved a radical revision of classical thinking that turned the
relation between construction and decoration inside out. Elaborating on what he
meant by “architectural features” being added “merely for the sake of what is
termed effect,” he noted that in classical buildings “ornaments are actually con-
structed, instead of forming the decoration of construction, to which … they should
always be subservient.” He then went on to say that “in pure architecture the smal-
lest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose; and … the construction itself
should vary with the material employed, and the designs should be adapted to the
material in which they are executed.”7
That one should decorate construction rather than construct decoration flew in
the face of classical theory and practice. Building upon a tradition that reached back
to Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), neoclassical architects such as Soufflot and
Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–99) equated the orders, and architecture by extension,
with decoration.8 “The temples of the Greeks,” the latter stated, “were decorated
both outside and within, by colonnades that enveloped the entire edifice.” “Our
modern authors,” on the other hand, “have substituted for these noble resources
of architecture a decoration formed by heavy arcades whose massive piers have as
their sole ornament a revetment of a few centimeters thick, which we, in architec-
ture, call pilasters.”9 The orders and the elements related to them were thus seen as
 The New Material-Based Realism 5

an autonomous decorative construct having only a metaphoric relation to the

actual construction, which was separate from it and masked by it.10
The general lack of self-consciousness, until the turn of the nineteenth century,
about the identification of architecture with decoration, and the corresponding dis-
regard for the generative role of construction, is evidenced by the change in title
that William Chambers’ treatise underwent between its first edition in 1759 and its
third in 1791. Though initially called A Treatise on Civil Architecture, it simply dis-
cussed the orders and the decorative elements derived from them in their applica-
tion to contemporary building programs of a public, monumental sort.
“The Moderns, in imitation of the Ancients,” Chambers explained, “have
made the Orders of Architecture the principal ornaments of their structures.”11
By the end of the century, however, the original title no longer appeared self-
explanatory and, despite the actual expansion of the text, the book was given
the more restrictive and, to our understanding, more accurate title of A Treatise
on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture.12
For Pugin, the realities of construction were to serve as the basis for decorative
elaboration. Such decoration was to enhance and give meaning to the building
through an expression of its material structure. In The True Principles, as elsewhere,
Pugin repeatedly returned to this issue, rephrasing it in a variety of ways. He spoke
of “the great principle of decorating utility” and of the necessity of “suiting the design
to the material and [then] decorating [the] construction.” “Constructing its ornament
instead of confining it to the enrichment of its construction,” he wrote, was always a sign
of artistic decadence. This could already be seen, in his view, in the late Gothic
architecture of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey.13
The difference between constructing decoration and decorating construction
was, in Pugin’s estimation, not only the difference between good and bad: it
was, in moral terms, the difference between truth and untruth and, in historical
terms, the difference between the Gothic and the classical. “Strange as it may
appear at first sight,” he noted after defining the structural and programmatic prin-
ciples that constituted what he called “the two great rules for design,” “it is in
pointed [Gothic] architecture alone that these great principles have been carried out.”
“The architects of the middle ages,” he added, “were the first who turned the natural
properties of the various materials [of construction] to their full account, and made their
mechanism a vehicle for their art.”14 “Pointed architecture,” he explained, “does not
conceal her construction, but beautifies it,” whereas “classic architecture seeks to con-
ceal instead of decorating it.” The constructed decoration of its façades, often mask-
ing Gothic-type flying buttresses as at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Church of Sainte-
Geneviève, led Pugin to assert that in classical architecture, more often than not,
“one half of the edifice is built to conceal the other.”15
The distinction between the decoration of construction and the construction of
decoration constituted a difference between expression and representation, the
drawing out of a form from a material ground as opposed to the substitution of
another figure for it. Where the former process can be likened to extrusion, the
6 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

latter is more like transcription. Gothic architecture was, in Pugin’s view, funda-
mentally different from classical architecture by virtue of this expressive potential,
which was intimately related to, indeed derived from, the material conditions of its
structure. “When the Greeks commenced building in stone, the properties of this
material did not suggest to them some different and improved mode of construction,”
whereas Gothic architects, he noted, proceeded on a more realistic and rational
basis in developing their forms from the capacities and conditions of masonry con-
struction alone. “A pointed church,” he explained, “is the masterpiece of masonry.
It is essentially a stone building; its pillars, its arches, its vaults … are all peculiar to
stone, and could not be consistently executed in any other material.”16
Following the argument earlier laid out by the older German architect Heinrich
Hübsch (1795–1863), first in his essay Über griechische Architectur (1822) and then in
his book Im welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (1828), which laid the blame for the
“sham and show architecture” of the classical tradition of “feigned constructions”
on the attempt to impose a trabeated form of decoration on an arcuated structural
system, Pugin maintained that arcuated construction was the only proper response
to building in stone.17 It represented a technological advance that could not be
abandoned; nor could it be denied without travestying history itself, as Roman
and Renaissance architects did through their adoption of the “inconsistent” deco-
ration of the orders.18 Turning the mimetic theory of transformation of the prim-
itive hut on itself, Pugin was thus able to claim that the dissimulating character of
classical architecture was the result of an inescapable flaw in its very constitution –
Hübsch called the theory of the primitive hut classicism’s “original sin”19 – and that
only Gothic architecture, by virtue of its nontransformative origins and emancipa-
tion from Greco-Roman traditions, was capable of an authentic, expressive realism.
How would Pugin, not to speak of his many followers in the Victorian Gothic
revival in whose initiation he played a major role, turn theory into practice? There
is no better place to look than Pugin’s Church of St. Giles, Cheadle, begun in 1840
at precisely the same time the architect was writing The True Principles. In the
church, he sought to achieve an expression of historical character rooted in local
conditions and material facts, based on a methodology meant to subvert the exist-
ing classical system of representation. The plan was deliberately designed to follow
that of a fourteenth-century, pre-Reformation parish church, with its chancel sepa-
rated from the nave by a rood screen, its pulpit just off to the side, a south porch for
everyday use, and a tall and semi-independent bell tower with spire to announce
from afar the church’s place in the town’s physical and spiritual fabric. The tower’s
strong and powerful stone shape seems to call into question the solidity of the
buildings around it, making it seem as if the church was there first and is the reason
for the town’s existence.
The tower is not alone in calling attention to its physical presence. In fact, each
functionally distinct part of the structure pulls out from the mass to dominate the
visual field and declare its individual identity. This gives the plan, in relation to the
overall composition, a determinate character. Pugin went to great pains to make
 The New Material-Based Realism 7

Figure 9.3 Augustus Welby Pugin, Church of St. Giles, Cheadle, 1840–46. South porch.
Credit: Author.

each separate element or volume read from a distance as distinguishable in shape,

the break in the roofline at the chancel being the most subtle and most important.
But above and beyond this functional expression of separate volumetric units is the
sheer physical expression of mass in the stone construction itself (Figure 9.3). Noth-
ing could be further from the idealized, purely representational character of earlier
neoclassical designs (Figure 9.1). St. Giles makes one conscious of the particular
color and texture of the stone, its redness owed to the local clay soil of Stafford-
shire. The buttresses exhibit the forces coursing through their short, stocky forms,
just as the capping stones tell us how they were designed to shed the rain. The
contrast between the richly decorated and illuminated surfaces of the interior
and the solemn, earthy forms of the exterior describes their different functions
and grounds the faith of the user in a reality that has physical bearing on the matter
(Figure 9.4). The authenticity of the structure serves to substantiate the authentic-
ity of the religious belief to which it is dedicated.
While it may seem ironic that the release from classical representation placed a
new premium on decoration as the exponent of construction, it is at the same time
clear why, at least for Pugin, the result was also an increased commitment to
imitation – not as a matter of metaphor but as a straightforward copying of the
past. The justification was self-evident: because Gothic buildings were integrally
arcuated constructions, whose decorative elaboration derived entirely from the
8 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Figure 9.4 Church of St. Giles, Cheadle.

Interior, south side aisle. Credit: Author.

materials and methods of production, a simple recreation in the nineteenth century

would ipso facto provide a model of how to avoid the deceptions and failures of the
preceding centuries of classically constructed decoration.
Pugin’s hope, however, was “not … to produce mere servile imitators” of the past
“but men imbued with the consistent spirit of the ancient [Gothic] architects, who would
work on their principles, and carry them out as the old men would have done, had they been
placed in similar circumstances, and with similar wants to ourselves.”20 The present
became in effect the perfect conditional of the past. The imitation of Gothic archi-
tecture was thus more a resumption than a representation of it. By eliminating the
illusionistic idealism of neoclassical representation, i.e., the material deceptiveness
of decorated construction, the expressive realism of the neo-Gothic guaranteed a
sense of authenticity and contemporaneity. Representation, as copying, became a
mere catalyst, containing the seeds of its eventual dissolution.
Returning to the medieval for guidance was not the only approach taken by pro-
gressive architects in the 1830s and 1840s. The attempt to evolve such radical
changes as proposed by Pugin within a classical framework, however, was a more
challenging effort, although one whose results, as in the case of Henri Labrouste,
would prove more inventive and forward-looking in terms of the development of
modern architecture. Unlike Pugin, Labrouste made his major contribution not
through theoretical writing but through teaching and, most importantly, through
buildings intended themselves to serve an educational purpose.
 The New Material-Based Realism 9

It could be said that Labrouste had little choice other than to work out his radical
ideas within the classical system. Educated between 1819 and 1824 in the still neo-
classical curriculum of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, he won the coveted
Grand Prix leading to a five-year fellowship at the French Academy in Rome.
There, he widened his horizons well beyond the ancient Roman and Renaissance
models of the neoclassical canon, and looked carefully not only at Greek architec-
ture itself but also at Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic buildings. When he
returned to Paris, he opened a teaching atelier where he sought to have his students
think broadly in terms of history and to synthesize what was common to the var-
ious historic styles of architecture based on their structural systems. He articulated
this structural rationalism, as it came to be called, in a letter written in 1830 out-
lining a methodology that sounds remarkably similar to what Pugin would soon
propose. Labrouste stated that his students “must first clearly see the purpose
for which their building is intended and arrange the parts according to the impor-
tance it is reasonable to give them.” “Once they know the first principles of
construction,” he continued, “I tell them that they must draw out from the con-
struction itself a rational and expressive ornamentation. I repeat to them often that
the arts have the power to embellish everything.”21
The previously “unexplored territory” opened up by this approach was soon
described by the well-known architectural critic and editor Adolphe Lance as bring-
ing to architectural education a “truth” akin to a “beam of light”: “Abruptly break-
ing with the traditions of the past … [Labrouste] established as a principle that in
the design of buildings form must always be adapted to and subordinated to func-
tion and that the decoration should derive from the construction expressed with
art.” Making construction come first and decoration issue from it “was quite
simply,” Lance wrote, “an inversion of the academic argument,” opening up to stu-
dents previously “unknown perspectives.”22
If education was the means by which Labrouste reached a select group of future
professionals, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, his first major building, “contin-
ued and completed Labrouste’s teaching.” According to the young architect/critic
Achille Hermant (1823–1903), it was “the best of his lessons.”23 The library, which
he began designing in 1838 and saw to completion in 1850–1, occupied Labrouste
for more than 12 years and represents the fullest expression of the radical turn he
gave to architecture as a form of structural rationalism (Figure 9.1). Occupying a
long narrow site flanking the former Church of Sainte-Geneviève (recently rede-
dicated as the Panthéon), the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève directly confronted
the exemplar of eighteenth-century neoclassicism and called into question the rep-
resentational principles on which it was based.
Labrouste’s library is an arcuated structure through and through, synthesizing
sources ranging from Magna Græcia and quattrocento Italy to Gothic France. After
toying with the idea of surrounding the main entrance facing Soufflot’s portico
with a doorway framed by two columns supporting a flat entablature, Labrouste
rejected any such intrusion of constructed decoration. The result was an
10 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Figure 9.5 Bibliothèque Sainte-

Geneviève. Façade on Place du Panthéon.
Credit: Author.

extraordinarily flat façade whose fundamentally linear articulation was derived

entirely from the sectional structure of the wall itself and the functions it contains
and brings to the surface (Figure 9.5). The ground floor, which houses storage areas
and the rare book and manuscript collections, is defined by a curtain wall punctu-
red by round-arched windows and the round-arched main doorway. A pendulous
garland supported by alternating cast-iron pateras and stone knobs defines the
upper edge of the wall while declaring its attachment to the structural arcade
behind. The upper floor, which is entirely occupied by a reading room made spa-
cious and luminous by its thin exposed cast- and wrought-iron structure, the first of
its kind (Figure 9.6), is expressed on the exterior as a frame-like arcade. Its upper
section opens into large lunette windows lighting the reading room, while its lower
part is filled in with partition-like panels that diagram the double-level of book-
shelves behind it. The names of authors inscribed on these panels correspond to
those on the spines of the books on the shelves. Labrouste attributed a symbolic
function as well to this lapidary form of decorated construction in characterizing
the façade of his library as a “monumental catalogue.”24
The reflexivity of interior and exterior grew out of a realism of expression that
had its correlate in the new concept of decorated construction, a deliberate
“inversion,” as Lance noted, of the earlier classical principle of constructed deco-
ration. Three drawings by Labrouste illustrate his awareness of the issue. One is
a partial elevation and section, the second the final study for the ironwork of
the reading room, and the third a working drawing for the stereotomy of the
 The New Material-Based Realism 11

Figure 9.6 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Reading room, looking west, by Edouard-

Antoine Renard. From L’Illustration, January 1851.

building’s upper story (Figures 9.7–9). The partial elevation/section (Figure 9.7)
explicitly shows how the library’s façade reveals in all its significant details what
occurs on the other side of the wall. The lower curtain wall passes in front of
the arcade pier, while the garland with its pateras and knobs indicates the point
where the lower-level arches spring and the encased floor beams are attached to
the curtain wall.
What happens on the upper story is more telling. One can see on the left side of
the section how the floor of the gallery-level bookshelf projects onto the façade as
the lower band of the panel between the piers of the arcade, and how the small
window beneath the band serves to light the internal passage behind the floor-level
bookshelves. One can also see how the top frame of the bookshelves on the mez-
zanine level is projected into the upper decorative band just beneath the lunette
windows’ sills. Finally, by comparing this drawing with a view of the interior
(Figure 9.4), one can see how both the upper and lower shelves’ vertical uprights
are transcribed onto the panels, and how the names of the authors thus read as the
obverse of the books’ spines on the shelves just behind them.25
A comparison of the partial elevation (Figure 9.7) with the final study for the
reading room’s iron structure takes the interior–exterior relationship one step
12 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Figure 9.7 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Partial elevation and section. Bibliothèque

Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.
 The New Material-Based Realism 13

Figure 9.8 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Reading room. Final study for ironwork.
Sections. Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

further by revealing how the two literally interpenetrate. In Figure 9.8 one can see
in the small section on the right that the semicircular iron arch supporting the metal
and plaster barrel vault is not only tied into the girding masonry arcade but that the
tie-rod itself pierces the spandrel to be bolted to the exterior facing by a circular
anchor in the form of a concave dish. The partial elevation allows us to see
how that point of interpenetration was elaborated into a decorative expression
of the structure that went well beyond what had been earlier indicated in a very
generalized and preliminary way.
Instead of screwing into a rather flat, depressed dish, the rod emerging through
the wall is fastened to the exterior stone facing by a circular black iron knob, cast in
a pointed, conical form (Figures 9.5 and 9.7). A ridged washer is relieved by a con-
centric depression in the stone, and the action of turning and tightening the nut is
reflected in the squiggly lines of stems and flowers that are seemingly forced out
from the cushion beneath the iron. At the same time, the iron disks of the lower
story, from which the garland hangs, bolt the iron floor trusses to the wall, though
in a less energetic manner than above, consistent with the more static structural
condition that obtains at that level. They are decorated with a gilded, intertwined
SG used in the library’s book stamp.
The working drawing for the stereotomy of the façade’s upper level, when seen
in relation to the final result (Figures 9.9 and 9.7), gives an excellent idea of how a
fully conceived and realized masonry construction preceded the decorative process
14 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Figure 9.9 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Working drawing of stereotomy of upper

floor. Elevation, section, and plan. Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

of elaboration that provided the desired degree of “embellishment.” Moreover, it

shows how that “embellishment” was determined by its structural underpinnings.
The stone structure provided the framework on which and in which the decorative
details were inscribed to inform, explain, or qualify the specific structural or pro-
grammatic role each element was meant to play in the overall design. Everything is
 The New Material-Based Realism 15

Figure 9.10 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Study for decoration of upper-floor façade.

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

tied to or derived from a real, functioning member of the construction while either
emphasizing some aspect of its structural connection or, like the names and vertical
divisions picked out in red in the panels, referring to a less physical, more symbolic
idea. Many studies for each element in the decorative program preceded the final
design, many more, as far as we know, than for the structure itself (Figure 9.10).
Critics were generally positive about the completed structure, although some-
what confused by its novelty and even unwilling to embrace it completely. The
critic for The Builder called the library “peculiar” and “original,” noting that “it will
not please everybody.”26 The one for the Paris daily Journal des débats described it as
“unconventional” and wrote that it would take some “getting used to.”27 The most
serious critical review was by Achille Hermant, published in the important journal
L’Artiste. Despite his admission of its significance, Hermant found the building
recalcitrant and ungiving. He was particularly displeased by Labrouste’s refusal
to employ the orders to impart the “grandiose character” the critic believed was
demanded by the program and site. “The character of a building is not measured
only by the use for which it is intended,” he stated. “The idea that [the building]
represents in the eyes of the public must have its place, and that place is primary.”
Echoing a well-worn neoclassical position, Hermant wrote that, lacking the
16 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

character that would have been secured by the use of the orders, “the poetic idea of
the work” remained unfulfilled.28
Hermant concluded that the building’s main problem lay in Labrouste’s convic-
tion “that architecture is nothing but decorated construction.” After explaining that
construction is but a “means” and should never be allowed to “dominate” but
always remain in the background, he issued his ultimate rebuke: “one should never
forget that everything that is true is not always beautiful.”29 Hermant did not mis-
understand Labrouste; he simply disagreed with him. By opposing the idea of
beauty to that of truth, he made it quite obvious that it was the fictive aspect of
neoclassical representation deriving from the construction of decoration, with its
basis in appearance as such, that Labrouste’s work called into question by relying
on the real conditions of materials and techniques of construction to create the
ground for artistic expression of a new sort.
Perhaps the most startling evidence of Labrouste’s vision for a structurally
rational and expressive architecture, transgressing the rules of verisimilitude and
thus the ideal unity of neoclassical representation, are the iron tie-rods that pierce
the façade to terminate in visible metal bolt heads locking the structure in place. By
puncturing the surface of the stone and allowing the interior metal structure to show
through, the exposed iron denies the classical ideality of the façade plane. The iron
bolt heads assert a sense of physical reality that disrupts the decorative fiction of a
façade, much as the elements of a collage would later do to the illusionistic surface of
the painted canvas.30 The decision to expose the iron on the exterior was hardly a
minor one for Labrouste, a fact revealed by the large number of highly developed
studies he did for the bolt heads themselves. Some show a much more conspicuous
and elaborate deployment of the material than was finally executed, including the
circular plate around the bolt head as well as the tendrils or garland issuing from it
(Figure 9.10). The exuberant decorative expression in these studies also suggests
that a late Gothic model, rather than a classical one, likely lay behind the idea.31
In effect, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève reversed the historical evolution of
Renaissance classicism that had reached a kind of culmination in Soufflot’s neigh-
boring church. There, iron had been employed to help construct the largest piece
of neoclassical decoration, in the form of a freestanding portico, that had yet been
built in France (Figure 9.1). In typically classical fashion, the iron was hidden in the
stone to allow the stone to represent a type of construction it could not achieve on
its own (Figure 9.2). By assigning a primary and visible role to each material of
construction, Labrouste made the fictive basis of neoclassical representation self-
evident, while at the same time suggesting how this would affect the very idea
of the façade as a matter of display.

The relationship between appearance and reality in post-antique European classi-

cal architecture had fundamentally devolved from the subservience of construction
to the demands of decoration. The inversion of the decoration/construction dyad
 The New Material-Based Realism 17

in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and the expression of the real elements of

structure and function on the exterior of the building produced a new type of rela-
tionship between interior and exterior that entailed a new way of reading buildings.
The conventional classical façade was read from bottom to top or top to bottom in
the vertical dimension, and from one side to the other in the horizontal one. In some
ways, this was no different from reading a painting. That is to say, the surface – which
is what we take to be the building’s reality – is scanned.
Much of the history of Renaissance and post-Renaissance classical architecture,
like much of the history of Western painting, has been about the production of an
illusion of three-dimensional depth on a flat, two-dimensional surface. In architec-
ture it was the constructed decoration of three-dimensional classical columns, enta-
blatures, pediments, and their accompanying ornaments such as balustrades,
volutes, and niches filled with statues that added depth or plasticity through surface
relief and shadow. Modeling and chiaroscuro provided the architect with the means
of giving “life” to the surface, so that the classical orders would appear to embody
an internal sense of vitality. One might feel in the “movement” and energy of these
animate decorative figures a depth of purpose and meaning, just as one might feel
gravity in an actor’s performance or profundity in a painting or story. But this is
only based on surface indications. One never thinks about what is happening
behind the surface, which is to say offstage, the very “reality” necessarily masked
by the verisimilitude of a theatrical performance.
In the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the surfaces read as flat, diagrammatic,
and lifeless (Figure 9.5). They are compacted and layered rather than modeled
and relieved. The two stories are not plastically continuous in the vertical dimen-
sion, nor, in such an obviously repetitive design, does there seem to be much
point in scanning the façade from side to side. Instead of scanning the surface
and imagining a sense of depth within it, one reads through the surface to the
building’s real depth. An active intellectual process of relating exterior to interior
replaces the more submissive, empathic experience of sensorial pleasure and
satisfaction.
This increased emphasis on the active engagement of the viewer issues from a
reflexivity between interior and exterior that provides a new and radical sense of
transparency. The reflexivity and the transparency can surely be attributed to the
sectional basis of the composition that was key to Labrouste’s conception of the
structure (Figure 9.7). As a vertical plan, the section enables us to see the actual
disposition of interior spatial and structural elements along their edges, so that
the exterior of the building is no longer perceived as a self-sufficient, representa-
tional façade – in the classical definition of that term – but rather as a contingent
expression of the realities on the other side of the wall. Though never seen as such,
the section is where interior and exterior intersect and where the facts of construc-
tion are revealed. In forcing us to read the library in section, Labrouste brought to
the surface, by means of decoration, those very elements of construction that had
18 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

necessarily been masked or denied by the representational demands of verisimil-

itude formerly satisfied through the construction of decoration.32
While both Pugin and Labrouste were impelled by a similar desire to give archi-
tecture a sound basis in reality and thus make construction and materials the carrier
of expression and meaning, their methodologies regarding history were vastly dif-
ferent. Pugin was tied to a perfect conditional reading of the past. Believing that he
could channel the very thinking of the Gothic architect, he was convinced he could
restore that period’s architectural integrity as an aspect of its religious fervor.
Although his legacy might therefore appear to be limited by its sectarian tone,
it was actually quite broad. His argument in The True Principles “that all ornament
should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building” not only
subtended John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) widespread contribution to architectural the-
ory but lay at the heart of Robert Venturi’s (b. 1925) notion of the “decorated shed”
that has held enormous sway over contemporary architecture.33 Labrouste’s ver-
sion of the new structural rationalism was notably more widespread and universal.
It can be traced through Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) and Auguste
Perret (1874–1954) to Louis Kahn (1901–74), although its most obvious application
was in the development of the curtain-wall steel- and later concrete-frame building
as most articulately theorized at the end of the nineteenth century by Louis Sullivan
(1856–1924). His “The Tall Building Artistically Considered” (1896) can fittingly be
read as a belated illustration of what Labrouste meant when he told his students
that “the arts have the power to embellish everything.”34

Notes

1. For a general discussion of this issue, see Neil Levine, Modern Architecture: Representation and
Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 45–74, 115–48; N. Levine, “Laugier’s
Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève, and the Enlightenment Theory of
Representation,” in The Companion to the History of Architecture, Volume II, Eighteenth-Century
Architecture, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Malden: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2016).
2. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 11–17 and passim.
3. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Duchesne, 1753). An English trans-
lation of the second edition (1755) was published as M.-A. Laugier, An Essay on Archi-
tecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann, Documents and Sources in Architecture 1
(Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977). William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Archi-
tecture, in Which the Principles of that Art are Laid Down and Illustrated by a Great Number of
Plates (London: by the author, 1759). A third edition appeared as A Treatise on the Dec-
orative Part of Civil Architecture (London: Joseph Smeeton, 1791).
4. The plate contrasting what Pugin sarcastically called “The Professor’s Own House”
with a late medieval house on the Rue de l’Horloge in Rouen, appeared in A[ugustus]
Welby [Northmore] Pugin, Contrasts: or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Four-
teenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present
 The New Material-Based Realism 19

Decay of Taste (London: Printed for the author, and published by him at St. Marie's
Grange, Near Salisbury, Wilts., 1836).
5. A[ugustus] Welby [Northmore] Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Archi-
tecture: Set Forth in Two Lectures Delivered at St. Marie’s, Oscott (London: John Weale,
1841), 1.
6. In his Essai sur l’architecture (repr. of 2nd rev. and enl. ed. of 1755, Farnborough, Eng-
land: Gregg Press, 1966), 9–10, Laugier wrote: “It is easy … to distinguish between
those parts that are essential to the composition of an architectural order, those that
have been introduced by need, and, finally, those that have been added only by
caprice. It is only in the parts that are essential that one finds beauty; in the parts
introduced by need consist all the licenses; and in the parts added by caprice are
all the faults.” In the foreword to the second edition, he noted that “the parts of
an architectural order are the parts of the building itself. They must therefore be
applied in such a way that they not only adorn, but actually constitute the building”
(ibid., xvii).
7. Pugin, True Principles, 1. Original emphasis.
8. Leon Battista Alberti, in On the Art of Building in Ten Books, orig. pub. 1486 as De
re aedificatoria; trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 6.13, wrote that “in the whole art of building
the column is the principal ornament without any doubt.” He continued: “it may
be set in combination, to adorn a portico, wall, or other form of opening, nor is it
unbecoming when standing alone. It may embellish crossroads, theaters, squares;
it may support a trophy; or it may act as a monument. It has grace, and it confers
dignity.” Andrea Palladio, in The Four Books of Architecture, orig. pub. 1579 as I
quattro libri dell’architettura, trans. Isaac Ware, 1738 (repr., New York: Dover Pub-
lications, 1965), 25, described “the ornaments of architecture, that is, the five
orders,” much as Alberti did.
9. Étienne-Louis Boullée, “Architecture, an Essay on Art,” in Boullée and Visionary Archi-
tecture, including Boullée’s “Architecture, Essay on Art,” ed. Helen Rosenau (London:
Academy Editions, 1976), 125.
10. In his Précis of the Lectures on Architecture; with Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Archi-
tecture, orig. pub. 1802–5/1821; trans. David Britt, Texts & Documents (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2000), 153–4, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) pre-
sciently criticized this conception as mere “architectonic decoration.” He even went
so far as to state that “what is generally known by the name of Architecture,” as in
the “palaces of the Escorial, Versailles, and the Tuileries,” is but “decoration.” Britt
unfortunately translated the unusual phrase “décoration architectonique” as simply
“architectural decoration.”
11. Chambers, Treatise on Civil Architecture, 42.
12. See note 3 above. In the later Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture, 135,
Chambers explained that the original Treatise on Civil Architecture was only intended
to cover the “decorative part of architecture” and that he had “reserve[d] for a future
occasion, whatever related to the convenience, strength, or economical management
of buildings.” “Ignorant how far I might be equal to the task,” he felt it would be
20 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

“presumptuous” to attempt the larger work and thus left the treatise limited to its pri-
mary, “decorative part.”
13. Pugin, True Principles, 5–7. Original emphasis.
14. Ibid., 1–2. Original emphasis.
15. Ibid., 3, 5. Original emphasis.
16. Ibid., 2–3. Original emphasis.
17. Heinrich Hübsch, “In What Style Should We Build?” orig. pub. 1828, trans. Wolfgang
Herrmann, in In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style,
ed. W. Herrmann, Texts & Documents (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the His-
tory of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 79, 96. See also H. Hübsch, Über griechische Archi-
tectur (Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1822).
18. A[ugustus] Welby [Northmore] Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture
in England (London: John Weale, 1843), 8.
19. Hübsch, “In What Style Should We Build?” 71.
20. Pugin, Apology, 22. Original emphasis.
21. Henri Labrouste to Théodore Labrouste, 20 November 1830, in Léon Dassy [Laure
Labrouste], Souvenirs d’Henri Labrouste, architecte, membre de l’Institut: Notes recueillies
et classées par ses enfants (Fontainebleau: by the author, 1928), 24. The word “ornamen-
tation” was more or less interchangeable with that of “decoration” in French usage of
the period. Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, vol. 2 of Ency-
clopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières, par une société de gens de lettres, de savans et
d’artistes, ed. C[harles] J[oseph] Panckoucke (Paris: Henri Agasse, 1801), 173–74 (s.v.
“Décoration”), spoke of “ornament or decoration” as if they were one and the same
thing. In his description of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Henri Labrouste, “A
M. le Directeur de la REVUE D’ARCHITECTURE,” Revue générale de l’architecture et des tra-
vaux publics 10 (1852): col. 384, described the inscription of the names of the authors on
the exterior of the building as “the principal decoration of the facade, just as the books
themselves are the most beautiful ornament of the interior.”
22. [Adolphe Lance], “Les professeurs d’architecture s’en vont,” Encyclopédie d’architecture
6 (August 1856), col. 123.
23. Achille Hermant, “La Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève,” L’Artiste, 5th ser., 7 (December
1, 1851): 131.
24. Labrouste, “A M. le Directeur,” col. 384.
25. In his review of the building, “Die Bibliothek St. Geneviève in Paris,” Allgemeine Bauzeitung
mit Abbildungen, 16th yr. (1851): 68, the former Labrouste student and Hamburg architect
Albert Rosengarten made many of these same points. “There is in the façade,” he wrote, “a
complete correspondence with the interior arrangement and the expression of the purpose
of the building; one recognizes that the ground floor, in its usage, plays a subordinate role;
that the upper wall under the large windows, which provide ample light, is divided into
panels that correspond to the interior divisions; on these panels are written the names of
the authors from earliest to most recent times, in chronological order, forming, so to speak,
a table of contents of the works that are arranged on the inner side of the same wall; the
small windows in between let you guess where the cabinets are located.”
26. Anon., “Promenades in Paris,” The Builder 8 (March 9, 1850): 111.
 The New Material-Based Realism 21

27. F[rançois] Barrière, “Embellissemens de Paris,” Journal des débats, December 31,
1850, 2.
28. Hermant, “Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève,” 130.
29. Ibid.
30. In a review of the building, one of its librarians, Henri Trianon, “Nouvelle Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève,” Illustration 17 (January 10–17, 1851): 30, noted how Labrouste
“frankly revealed the materials that had been so useful to him. Beginning on the exte-
rior, the iron announces itself in the form of large paterae resembling nuts. Above the
windows of the ground floor, it is by their head that these nuts present themselves.
Above the windows of the upper floor, it is by the tip.”
31. Rosengarten, “Bibliothek,” 68, specifically remarked on this innovation, noting that
“the iron vaults of the library along with the iron beams of the ground floor are held
together by the anchors that are shown on the exterior as iron disks.”
32. The importance of the section in thinking through a design must have featured in Lab-
rouste’s teaching, as evidenced by his former student Antoine Couchaud’s description,
in his Choix d’églises bysantines en Grèce (Paris: Lenoir, 1842), 12, of the “principle, so true
in architecture, which demands that the exterior façade of a building be nothing but the
representation of its interior conformation, or to put it better, the section translated
into the façade.”
33. For further discussion of this, see Neil Levine, “Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown’s The Duck/Decorated Shed Dyad in a Historical Perspective,” in Eyes That
Saw, ed. Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2017).
34. See Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine 57 (March 1896): 403–9. Reprinted in Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers, ed.
Robert Twombly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104–13.

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