Lecture 12- Enlightenment, Revolution, and Neoclassicism

The Age of Enlightenment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau…The Social Contract… scientific revolution

= Enlightenment thinkers condemned Baroque architecture and Rococo art for being immoral and indecent, calling for a new kind of art that would be moral and teach people right from wrong

Neoclassicism

a return to the Classicism of Antiquity as the Italian Renaissance began to be perceived as offering architectural paradigms that were untrue to the Antique. Taste was also turning away from Baroque and Rococo, and moving towards a greater appreciation of the importance of archaeology and scholarship to arrive at an architecture that was more true to the spirit of Antiquity

Image Identification+ Caption

Principal Front of Shelburne House in Berkeley Square, Robert Adam vs. Campo Vaccino by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The front of the Shelburne house is a neoclassical design focused on symmetry, geometry, pilasters, and decorative features. It is pleasing to the eye with its continual horizontal features and the way it complements its surroundings. The Campo embraces a rustic, ruined, and romantic design embracing beauty in chaos and unaesthetic features.

Romanticism

insistence on individual experience, intuition, instinct, and emotion. Commonly perceived as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Classicism, and Neo-Classicism

Site/ Location/ Architect

Strawberry Hill House

Twickenham, England

Horace Walpole

Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–69)

Publication of Essai sur l’architecture (An Essay on Architecture) that solidified French movement towards rationalism and legalism and the rethinking of the role of civic institutions with a subtext of antimonarchism

The “Rustic Hut”

Palladio’s publication pointed past the classic heritage of Roman/ Greek architecture and went to a more rustic past-

rustix huts were minimal and only consisted of columns, entablatures, and pediments

Site/ Location/ Architect

Ste-Geneviève (Panthéon)

Paris, France

Jacques-Germain Soufflot

Site/ Location/ Architect

Royal Saltworks

Arc-et-Senans, France

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

Image Identification+ Caption

Neoclassical industrial architecture

t was built on a large scale designed as a place for work and reflecting enlightened ideology.

It was used for salt production and contained heating boilers for evaporating liquid, leaving behind the salt.

Inspectors would live on site in the center with the workers’ houses around. The semicircular layout was inspired by the shape of the sun and allowed for a hierarchical organization of work.

The buildings shown include workshops, worker housing, a bakery, a chapel, and administrative offices. It also included vegetable gardens allowing workers to provide for themselves.

In all, the structure includes many enlightenment ideas in one. It was “architecture that talks”.

Site/ Location/ Architect

Barrière de la Villette

Paris, France

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

Étienne-Louis Boullée

Pretty drawings guy

A Parisian architect whose importance lies in his theoretical writings and visionary drawings, as he taught generations of pupils.

responded to Laugier’s reductionist themes by stripping all unnecessary ornament from volumetrically pure forms inflated to a megalomaniac scale, repeating elements such as columns on a massive scale, and making his architecture expressive of its purpose (speaking architecture)

Image Identification

Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton

Date: 1784

Architect: Étienne-Louis Boullée

Image Identification+ Caption

Section, Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton

This symbolistic structure was designed by Etienne-Louis Boullee following the Neoclassical style and speaking architecture. The exterior globe was meant to be surrounded by cypress trees to represent mourning. There are also perforations within it which would create light effects so one can have a feel for what day and time it was. These light effects were also meant to work with the central lamp hung inside to represent the sun and form a celestial feel. It sought to express the idea of the heavens within, wanting people to feel insignificant before nature and the great creator. In this, the structure also embrace Newton’s cosmic theories.

French Revolution+ Napoleon Bonaparte

Impact of the Napoleonic era was introducing concepts like liberty and justice

Napoleon proved that nations could function without the paternalism of kings and princes