Nature by Design

The article looks at ornament in the nineteenth century through the lens of vitalist traditions in philosophy and the botanical science

Erasing the Ketchaoua Mosque: Catholicism, Assimilation and Civic Identity in France and Algeria

The book chapter looks at the French policy in colonial Algeria of forcibly converting Muslim religious buildings in relation to recent debates around multiculturalism and the building of mosques in Europe. It is focused on the case of the Ketchaoua mosque in Algiers, which was seized by French officials in 1832 and rebuilt into a cathedral over the next decades. The essay looks at the resulting arabizing forms of the cathedral and relates them to the assimilationist aims of the Catholic Church and its effort to employ outward expressions of Algerian culture as a clandestine means of destroying Algerian religious identity

Second Nature

A short essay on ornament and fear in the nineteenth century

Émile Zola’s Volatile Utopia

“Émile Zola’s Volatile Utopia,” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Architectural Education, considers the politicization of ornament in the residential quarter in Émile Zola’s utopian novel Travail (1901) in relation to fin-de-siècle anarchic movements in the decorative art

Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux and the Symbolic Interpretation of Architectural Origins in 19th-Century France

This essay examines the design by French architect Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux of a tomb of the maritime explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, erected in the cimetière du Sud in Paris (today, Montparnasse cemetery) in 1844. Its unusual parabolic profile and the vivid polychromy of its surface made it something of an archetype for architects in Paris in the 1840s, who saw it as an assault on the neoclassical ideals promoted by the French Academy. In the world of the visual arts, music, and literature, Romanticism is among the most fundamental movements, a watershed moment in which art was rethought in light of the exigencies of the modern world. Romanticism in architecture, however, is more difficult to describe. Drawing on French Romantic philosophy, particularly the works of Pierre Leroux and Victor Cousin, and from archeologists, especially the work of Charles Lenormant, this essay interprets the tomb of Dumont d’Urville within the Romantic discourses of the early 19th century. It argues that the tomb’s Romanticism lay in its ability to enact a totalizing ideology, one which fused form and content, communication, and expression

Dans l’atelier de Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux

The book chapter is focused on the architectural training of the architect and decorative artist, Jules Bourgoin (1838-1908). Using archival collections at the Institut national d'histoire de l’art, I described the intellectual and artistic environment of the École des Beaux-Arts atelier of Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux (1801-1871) through the eyes of his pupil Bourgoin, and demonstrated the way in which Bourgoin’s turn to ornament derived from the pedagogy and artistic doctrine presented in the atelier

From Male Master To Caring Mediator. Lieven De Cauter on utopia, the commons, urban gardening and the changing role of the architect

INTRODUCTION This interview took place in early January, 2023 between Belgian philosopher, art historian, writer, and activist, Lieven De Cauter (b. 1959), and Ralph Ghoche, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University. De Cauter is Professor of the Philosophy of Culture in the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning at KU Leuven and the author of some 20 books. Beyond his academic writings, De Cauter has published poems, essays in architectural critic..

Ce que les mobilisations environnementalistes font à l’architecture : mises en perspectives internationales et historiques

La prise en compte des problématiques environnementales fait l’objet de politiques, de normes et de « bonnes pratiques » désormais intégrées à tous les échelons de l’action publique. Pour autant, la timidité des réponses institutionnelles apportées à la crise écologique et la lenteur avec laquelle les agendas politiques sont mis en place suscitent, en réaction, des mobilisations citoyennes de plus en plus nombreuses. En Europe, l’opposition et la résistance à des projets urbains, d’équipement..

Ornament and Expressive Lines: Nature and Symbol in Victor Ruprich-Robert's Flore ornementale

This chapter examines the work of Victor Ruprich‐Robert (1820–87), an architect and leading reformer of ornament during the Second Empire, and situates it within the crisis of meaning in ornamentation in mid‐nineteenth‐century France. Particular attention is given to Flore ornementale, Ruprich‐Robert's major work on ornamental design, first published in 1866, and republished in expanded form in 1876. The chapter locates the main ideas set forth in the book at the intersection of new ideals in philosophical aesthetics and the natural sciences appearing in France in the 1850s and 60s

The Symbolic, the Lithic and the Legible: Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Architectural Eclecticism

This dissertation traces the career of Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux (1801-1871), an important, yet little-studied, architect and educator who played a central role in mid-nineteenth-century architectural culture and pedagogy in France. In his writings, his designs, and his teachings at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the private atelier established in 1836, Constant-Dufeux presented architecture as a discipline primarily concerned with symbolic expression and communication. Constant-Dufeux played a key role in determining what would later be called, the Néo-Grec façade. Moreover, his influential teachings on the unity of the arts, his attention to the burgeoning field of aesthetics, and his interest in ornamental design, left a lasting imprint on the subsequent generation of architects and decorative artists. The dissertation is organized in two parts. Structured as an intellectual history, the first part charts the discourse on symbolic representation as developed by philologists, philosophers, archeologists and architects in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Here, I explore two parallel developments that were consequential in the way the symbol was understood by Constant-Dufeux: the migration of German Romantic theories of the symbol into France, and the emergence of a "symbolic interpretation" of origins in the architectural discourse of the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries that challenged neoclassical accounts based on imitation. The second part traces the social, political and aesthetic philosophy of Constant-Dufeux from his early formation in the administration of the Ponts et Chaussée and in the atelier of François Debret at the École des Beaux-Arts, through his decisive experience in Italy as a recipient of the Grand Prix in 1829, to his professional career in Paris. I provide close readings of the architect's chief works: the fifth-year envoi from Rome for a Chamber of Deputies, the façade for the École Gratuite de Dessin de Paris on the rue Racine, the design of a medal for the Société Centrale des Architectes, and his most ambitious and multi- layered work: the tomb for the rear-admiral Dumont d'Urville in the Montparnasse Cemetery. In addition, I assess more fully the architect's larger vision and theory in light of the reigning eclecticism of the epoch. The architect's eclecticism is read through the lens of Ludovic Vitet, César Daly and Victor Cousin, and I demonstrate that far from being a undirected mélange of competing historical styles, it was intended as a purposeful, even utopian strategy of provoking a yet unseen modern architectural form