Léo SUN First Year – HTS (Term 1) Word count: ~1950
Ledoux is dead, vive Ledoux!
‘[...] one could indeed write a history of architectural history from the vantage point of Ledoux’s reception over the last two centuries’ (Anthony Vidler, 2005:10). Rather, one could say: ‘from the sole vintage point of Kaufmann’s reception’. Emil Kaufmann’s controversial treatise, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933), was to be one of the first of its kind to suggest that the 20th century avant-garde had roots older than itself; thus opening the debate on the origins of modernism, and the relationship between architectural form and society in general (Vidler, 2008). For instance, where Colin Rowe looked at the ‘structural system’ as a common denominator to Palladio and Le Corbusier (1947), Kaufmann analyzed the ‘architectural system’ (1933; 1943) underlying Ledoux’s buildings (Fig.1). Both – one through observing proportion, plan, symmetry, and the other, the relation of the whole to each parts – made a bold statement on the continuity between two architects across distinct historical periods. However, as Schapiro pointed out in his critique of Kaufmann’s conceptual framework, the risk is great in ‘[disregarding] the interplay of social forces and conditions’ (1933:265)1. Taking Schapiro’s cue then, this essay is an attempt, through a (re)reading of Ledoux, at resuscitating the New Viennese School’s 2 initial aim in laying the basis for a scientific (‘wissenschaftlich’) analysis of architectural history; an analysis that I regard to be a materialist understanding of history. Just as Rykwert concluded in discussing Laugier’s Primitive Hut3: ‘it is the extreme revolutionary and the backward-looking academician, who see nature providing the conceptual model for the hut before the necessity of shelter forced men to build themselves huts’ (1981:73).
I. PRE-REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
A. CONTEXT AND THE POSITION OF ARCHITECTURE In the decades leading to the outbreak of 1789, the monarchy, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, pleased the Third Estate with liberal reforms in order to gain its support for putting pressure on a nobility reluctant to pay taxes. These were the years of Mme de Pompadour, Anne Robert Turgot, Mme du Barry, and Jacques Necker, important statesmen and members of the court under whom intellectual and artistic life was relatively freer. This was reflected in the progressive erosion of the Royal Academy of Architecture’s conservativeness over architectural theory and production (Braham, 1980). From Laugier to Blondel, to Le Roy and Soufflot, a whole generation of
1
More recently, the authors of Pure Hardcore Icons (2013) have even embraced an architectural analysis detached from space, material, and especially, social and political considerations to the point of ‘architectural unconsciousness’ (Garcia and Frankowski, 2013:23) (Fig.2). 2
Less than a unified group, the New Viennese School was an intellectual evolution between the 1910s and 1930s. 3 The reference is all the more apposite as Ledoux himself references Rousseau’s Primitive Men and Laugier’s Primitive House.