The Unrealised Vision of an Imperial Forum for Vienna

The Michaelerplatz façade of the Hofburg, Vienna.

SIDLING UP THE KOHLMARKT and entering the Hofburg through the Michaelerplatz is a glorious architectural experience, but viewing Vienna’s imperial palace from the Ringstraße end, one is left with a certain awkwardness. This is because what is now the Heldenplatz, open to the neighbouring Volksgarten, was conceived as part of a great imperial forum, the Kaiserforum, but the scheme has been left incomplete.

The original impetus for this forum was the plan to build the identical Kunsthistoriches Museum and Natural History Museum across from the Hofburg next to the former imperial stables. Emperor Franz Joseph held a closed competition for four invited architects — Carl Hasenauer, Theophil von Hansen, Heinrich Ferstel, and Moritz Löhr — to conceive of an overall scheme to expand the Hofburg in order to provide an architectural connection to the two new museums.

The Dresden architect Gottfried Semper was chosen to oversee and arbritrate the competition, but was dissatisfied with the four plans the chosen architects contrived. Instead, Semper conceived his own plan for a grand imperial forum flanked by two great wings reaching out towards the two museums. Grand archways would span the Ringstraße creating a physical connection between the buildings and continuing the visual unity of the project. A new Festsaal and throne room would look out onto the new Kaiserforum.

The twin museums were built across the Ringstraße according to designs by Carl Hasenauer, finished in 1891, and construction began on the southern wing of the two flanking arms of the expanded palace. Franz-Joseph, however, lost interest in the project after the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth. While the southern wing, now known as the Neue Berg, was completed on the exterior in 1913, work on its northern complement was never started. No one quite knew what to do with the Neue Berg anyhow, as it was not built for any function but for mere aesthetic purposes. (It now houses the Ephesus Museum, the Museum of Ethnology, most of the Austrian National Library, the Arms & Armoury Collection, and the Musical Instrument Collection.)

The Neue Burg is now the visual focus of the Heldenplatz, a role it was not at all designed for. The overall effect of the space today is rather poor. I had thought perhaps they should build the northern wing as an exact copy of the southern one. It could be used to house the European Parliament (given its location and history Vienna is a much more logical capital for Europe than Brussels). Or it could be home for some of the numerous United Nations entities based in the city (along with Geneva, Nairobi, and the New York headquarters, Vienna is one of the four major homes of the United Nations).

Manfred Matzka, a top-ranking civil servant in the Austrian Chancellery, suggested it be built to house the proposed Museum of the History of the Austrian Republic. The finally completed space would then form a Forum der Republik rather than Kaiserforum, a suggestion which attracted praise and derision.

The much greater likelihood is that nothing will be done, and the present aesthetic dissatisfaction will remain. It’s not ugly, after all, merely incomplete.

I happened to stumble upon the Order of Malta church in Vienna while meandering down the Kärntner Straße in the middle of a snowy day. It’s a small and relatively simple church consisting of a Gothic nave with an organ gallery. The Order has occupied the site since 1217, though the bulk of the current church dates from the fifteenth century. In 1806, Commander Fra’ Franz von Colloredo had the façade remodelled in the Empire style fashionable at the time. The altarpiece, a painting by Johann Georg Schmidt depicting the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, is from a few decades earlier in 1730, and there is a splendid Neoclassical monument to Jean de la Valette including telamonic Saracens. The church is also decorated with forty coats of arms: five of grand priors, one cardinal, a grand commander, twenty-nine commanders, and one bailiff.

The neighbouring Johanneshof was built in 1839, but unfortunately both it and the Malteserkirche were sold off in 1933 to pay off the debts incurred by the numerous hospitaller activities of the Order during the First World War. The Order continued in the use of the Church, which has protected architectural status under the law, and it was purchased by a benefactor in 1960 who donated it back to the Order of Malta.

The Deutschordenshaus, the home of the Teutonic Order (which was transformed into a religious order of priests, nuns, and associates in 1923) is not very far away on Singerstraße, much closer to the Stephansdom.

An ambitious Italian’s mad plan to bulldoze the Roman Forum, destroy Michaelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, and build a Napoleonic palace atop the Capitoline Hill.

Some architectural projects are just so completely mental and insane that you actually have to doff your cap to the creativity of their inventors. Scipione Perosini’s ‘Projet d’un palais impérial à Rome’ is one such plan.

In the 1800s, with Napoleon the master of Europe, prominent citizens of various Italian cities submitted plans for the architectural aggrandisement of their communities under the beneficent patronage of the revolutionary monarch. In Rome, the architect and hydraulic engineer Scipione Perosini drafted his project for a imperial Napoleonic megapalace.

Atop the Capitoline, Michaelangelo’s Piazza del Campidolgio would be destroyed except for the Palazzo dei Senatori, which would be the central focus of a massive neo-classical palace encompassing the entire Capitoline Hill. From the Hill, a series of terraces would cascade down to the Roman Forum, which would be demolished and paved over to form a new ‘Foro di Napoleone’ celebrating the emperor. Across the Forum, on the Palatine, a new imperial residence circled by gardens would house Napoleon, who proclaimed himself King of Italy, during his prospective stays in the second capital of his empire.

Besides the imperial residence, Perosini’s megalomaniacal scheme would include offices for twenty ministries, a court of appeals, a prefecture, the customs bureaucracy, barracks for the Imperial Guard, and plenary chambers for the constitutional assemblies.

David Watkin, in his history of the Roman Forum, notes the palace “was to incorporate the Palazzo Venezia as its administrative wing, the historic church of S. Maria Aracoeli on the Capitol as its chapel, and the Forum as its inner courtyard”.

Napoleon in his portrait as King of Italy

As Terry Kirk notes (in the informative The Architecture of Modern Italy, Volume I, The Challenge of Tradition: 1750-1900), in the Imperial Palace “facets of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Rome were reconstructed in a gargantuan field of columns and halls stretching across the Forum Romanum to the Colosseum.”

But Kirk also points out of Perosini that “his proposal was far too grand to ever be taken seriously”. One historian described it as “ludicrously ambitious and costly”; another as “impossibly grandiose and destructive”. One is astounded by the sheer bravado to conceive of destroying forever the remaining ruins of the Roman Forum, though one should point out the Forum at that time was much less excavated, and thus much less apparent in how much of it was actually left.

“It was far too expensive to build,” Susan Vandiver Nicassio points out (in Imperial City: Rome under Napoleon), “and it would have required a destruction of ancient monuments that would have outdone the barbarians.”

Born Napoleone di Buonaparte in a moderately successful Italian family of untitled nobility on Corsica, Napoleon was, at the hight of his power, “By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Helvetic Confederation”.

“In 1811,” Nicassio continues, “a multi-century, multi-continental rule of the House of Bonaparte seemed entirely possible; within two years the Napoleonic rule in Europe had begun to crumble, and before 1815 it was gone.”

It is obvious that Perosini’s project — thank God — never had a chance of becoming reality. It would have been one of the greatest acts of cultural desecration Europe has witnessed, but despite the rapacious destruction it would wreak and the chauvinist arrogance of its spirit, I can’t help but almost admire his scheme. As Nicassio avers, “it was a dream worthy of the new great Caesar.”

And very well: just so long as it remains on the drawing board.

The Augustinian Church of St Nicholas of Tolentine

The Church of St Nicholas of Tolentine dominates the busy intersection of University Avenue and West Fordham Road in the Bronx. The parish was erected by the archdiocese in 1906 and has been served by Augustinians ever since then. The present church is a modern gothic creation from 1927, and probably one of the most handsome Catholic churches in the borough — it is often nicknamed “the cathedral of the Bronx”. (Though that style is sometimes also ascribed to St Jerome’s in Mott Haven).

The church is of suitably grand proportions, but the effect is somewhat diminished by the unfortunate use of bulky wooden pews. They are ill-suited to such a large church, and detract from the spaciousness of the interior. This is unfortunately a very frequent problem in the United States, where clumsy pews crowd even great cathedral churches like St Patrick’s in Manhattan or the glorious Cathedral Basilica in St Louis. Regardless, St Nicholas of Tolentine is a splendid ornament in this borough of many churches.

A Carl Laubin capriccio pays tribute to the first decade of Driehaus laureates

THIS YEAR MARKED the tenth anniversary of the Driehaus Prize, the annual award honouring a living architect who has contributed to the field of traditional and classical architecture. To commemorate the first decade of the Prize, the architectural painter Carl Laubin was commissioned to produce a splendid capriccio depicting the works of the first ten Driehaus laureates.

As Witold Rybczynski, a member of the Driehaus panel of jurors, writes:

In the foreground is the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, a bronze miniature of which is presented to each laureate. It’s fun to try and identify the individual works in this large (5½ by over 8 feet long) painting. But what is more striking is that Laubin has created a convincing urban landscape solely out of landmark buildings.

That, of course, is the advantage of classicism: however it is interpreted, it is a tradition that manages to produce a more or less coherent whole. Even Abdel-Wahed El Wakil’s mosque, standing next to a Seaside beach house by Robert A. M. Stern, doesn’t look too out of place.

The Driehaus Prize was founded in part as a rival to the more publicised Pritzker Prize awarded to modernist architects. But, Mr Rybczynski points out, the fundamental nature of modernist structures is that they thrive only as a visual contrast to buildings constructed in a traditional style.

Can one imagine a similar townscape of Pritzker Prize winners? Well, maybe with the work of some of the early laureates—Pei, Bunshaft, Tange, Siza—but modern buildings need a background of nineteenth and early twentieth century urbanism to shine. A town made up of only signature buildings by our current generation of stars would resemble a carnival or a theme park—Pritzkerland.

I’ve often thought this of the United Nations headquarters in New York, which, when it was first built, must have stood out brilliantly as a bright and fresh harbinger of a better future, but which has been rendered altogether rather boring by the construction of neighbouring buildings of third-rate plate-glass modernist designs.

The UN headquarters on the East River and Lever House on Park Avenue were breakthrough buildings, but the increasing replacement of their traditional stone-clad or brick neighbours by cheap, tawdry modernist structures has exposed how reliant this type of architecture — even when well-conceived and properly executed — is on being surrounded by a contrasting style.

But enjoy Mr Laubin’s painting — while remembering that all these buildings were designed and built by living architects.

More on this year’s Driehaus Prize is available from David Brussat here.

The Oratory Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Brompton Road, London

In the south transept of the Brompton Oratory is the altar dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, perhaps the finest altar in the entire church. It is a favourite place for getting in a few prayers and offering a candle or two or three or four. At the end of Solemn Vespers & Benediction on Sunday afternoon (above) it is where the Prayer for England is said and the Marian antiphon sung.

The Lady Altar was designed and built in 1693 by Francesco Corbarelli of Florence and his sons Domenico and Antonio and for nearly two centuries stood in the Chapel of the Rosary in the Church of St Dominic in Brescia. That church was demolished in 1883, and the London Congregation of the Oratory purchased the altar two years beforehand for £1,550.

The statue of Our Lady of Victories holding the Holy Child had previously stood in the old Oratory church in King William Street, and the central space of the reredos was slightly modified to house it. The Old and New Worlds are represented in the flanking statues, which are of St Pius V and St Rose of Lima — both by the Venetian late-baroque sculptor Orazio Marinali. The statues of St Dominic and St Catherine of Siena which now rest in niches facing the altar were previously united to it, and are by the Tyrolean Thomas Ruer.

HOLYROOD IS SUCH a pleasant spot, despite the recent intrusion of an ostentatiously ugly government building designed by a Spanish architect. The other day, while visiting Edinburgh, I heeded the recommendation of the Prettiest Schoolteacher in Clackmannanshire to sample the burger at the Holyrood 9a. It was quite delicious, though not perfect, and was splendidly washed with a pint of Kozel (most un-Caledonian, I concede, but you can get Deuchars in London, you know).

Afterwards, our little party decided to have a little wander down Holyrood Road towards the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the epicentre of the Scottish monarchy.

Nestled between Calton Hill and Salisbury Crags, the Palace sits at the end of the Royal Mile that runs between it and Edinburgh Castle. With the Old Town to its west, the expanse of Holyrood Park flows off to the south and east of it.

An Augustinian abbey dedicated to the Holy Cross was founded on the site in 1128 on the command of King David I. A relic of the True Cross is believed to have been in the possession of David’s mother Saint Margaret, and was probably kept in the abbey church. As the monastery was a royal foundation, it was highly favoured by Scotland’s monarchs and Robert the Bruce held a parliament at Holyrood in 1326. It was probably around this time that its function as a royal residence began. With the interment of the remains of David II in 1370, Holyrood became a royal burying ground, and several later kings of Scotland were born, married, and buried at the place.

When the Reformation reared its ugly head in Scotland, the Abbey was abolished and its church fell into neglect and ruin, with only the nave being kept in good condition as the local (Presbyterian) parish kirk. When James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England and moved to London, Holyrood Palace lost its role as an active royal residence and the secularised buildings began to be neglected as well.

The Palace fared better under the Charleses. Charlie the First held a Scottish coronation at Holyrood, which necessitated certain repairs and restorations, and appointed the (1st) Duke of Hamilton as Keeper of Holyroodhouse, an office which his descendants have maintained to this day. It was Charles II who really made Holyroodhouse the royal palace it is today. He employed Sir William Bruce, the Surveyor of the King’s Works, to build a classical quadrangle in the middle of the palace and complete ranges of apartments around it, balancing the west façade with a replica tower house to match the ancient one.

But Holyrood’s history — like Scotland’s — is a continual series of ups and downs. With the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland lost even its status as a kingdom with an absentee king: it was now part of a single United Kingdom with the capital at London. From the on the Palace’s fortunes waxed and waned until George V insisted it be properly renovated and maintained so that it could function once more as the official Edinburgh royal residence of the King of Great Britain.

One of the few governmental functions that continued to take place at Holyroodhouse was the election of Scotland’s representative peers (above). When Scotland and England joined together in 1707, the English aristocracy feared their House of Lords would be swamped by the addition of Scotland’s titled nobility. Hence, they negotiated that Scotland’s peers would elect a proportionate number of themselves to sit in the House of Lords at Westminster. This system continued until 1963, when it was decided to allow all Scottish peers to take their seats at Westminster.

I was disturbed to see that the Scottish standard now flies from Holyrood every day, in defiance of tradition. The previous custom had been that it would only fly when the monarch was in residence, or when the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland — a sort of royal envoy to the annual Presbyterian pow-wow — was exercising his functions at Assemblytide. It is always a shame when the special becomes quotidian.

Two new alleyways designed by George Holt & Andrew Gould

Charleston, the finest city of the American South, boasts two new alleyways designed by the architectural-urbanist partnership of George Holt and Andrew Gould. Holt began buying and restoring old Charleston houses two decades ago, and later expanded his work to building new houses in the traditional style of the town. Recently he’s combined with Andrew Gould, a specialist in the design of Orthodox churches, to craft an “urban infill project” plotting two short alleyways of modern houses built in an eclectic traditional vernacular: Charles Street and Tully Alley.

The previous structures on the four adjacent lots were in a semi-ruined state. Holt decided to consolidate the lots into two alleyways of ten houses, paved with the bricks of the collapsed buildings.

Despite their traditional appearance and compact layout, the houses are built with all the modern requirements and are completely up to the strict building code required in this hurricane-prone region.

No. 6, Charles Street is perhaps the jewel of the two alleyways (pictured at the very top of this post). The primary rooms of an elevated town house wrap around a quite Mediterranean terrace, which overlooks the street through a classical colonnade.

The terrace also conveniently conceals a carport beneath, where automobiles can cool in the shade, away from the treacherous Carolinian sun.

No. 1, Tulley Alley is another gem, incorporating a Spanish-arabesque porch with sculpted moulds created from a single cast of concrete.

Charles Street and Tully Alley are models of wise urban development. They incorporate the best modern features in a compact footprint and are designed to harmonise with their surroundings and in accord with the long architectural tradition of Charleston. One hopes Holt and Gould have more opportunities to employ their urbanist skills with the panache they have shown here.

In addition to my post on Charles Street & Tully Alley, here are another two houses designed by Andrew Gould. Like the other project, they are an urban infill project, built at the back of a lot on Ashley Avenue in Charleston, and the first house shown here is the architect’s own house.

Sir James Pennethorne’s University of London

German university buildings are an (admittedly unusual) obsession of mine, and I’ve often thought that No. 6 Burlington Gardens is London’s closest answer to your typical nineteenth-century Teutonic academy’s Hauptgebäude. And the connection is appropriate enough, as No. 6 was built in 1867-1870 for the University of London in what had once been the back garden of Burlington House (which at the same time became home to the Royal Academy of Arts). Despite the building’s Germanic form, the architect Sir James Pennethorne decorated the structure in Italianate detail, providing the University with a lecture theatre, examination halls, and a head office. Pennethorne died just a year after drafting this design, and his fellow architects described it as his “most complete and most successful design”.

The University of London was founded as a federal entity in 1836 to grant degrees to the students of the secularist, free-thinking University College and its rival, the Anglican royalist King’s College. It now is composed of eighteen colleges, ten institutes, and a number of other ‘central bodies’, with over 135,000 students.

Since its founding, the University had been dependent upon the government’s purse for funding, as well as for housing. Accomodation was provided in Somerset House, then Marlborough House, before evacuating to temporary quarters in Burlington House and elsewhere. It was not until the 1860s that Parliament approved the appropriate grant for a purpose-built home for the University to be erected in the rear garden of Burlington House.

The relative simplicity of the design was contrasted by a healthy dose of sculptural accompaniment. Statues of Newton, Bentham, Milton, and Harvey adorn the portico, representing (respectively) Science, Law, Arts, and Medicine, while the Galen, Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Justinian stand atop the main balustrade. The east wing of the façade houses statues of ‘illustrious foreigners’: Galileo, Goethe, and Laplace atop the balustrade with Leibnitz, Cuvier, and Linnaeus in the niches. The ‘English worthies’ grace the west wing: William Hunter, David Hume, and Sir Humphry Davy on the balustrade and Adam Smith, Locke, and Bacon in the niches. Hume replaced the original choice of Shakespeare, with Davy replacing John Dalton. It was decided that, as “the genius of Shakespeare was independent of academic influence”, he would be honoured with a sculptural monument inside the building.

Queen Victoria ceremonially opened the building upon its completion in 1870 — “in pouring rain”, the Survey of London tells us.

The University decided to move out to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington in 1899, and No. 6 was temporarily home to the British National Antarctic Expedition before being allocated to the Civil Service Commission in 1902, which partly shared the building with the British Academy. The Commission significantly rearranged the structure of the building, dividing the triple-height lecture theatre into three new floors of offices and making other utilitarian alterations. It left in the 1960s, and in 1970 the Ethnology Department of the British Museum opened its collections for viewing as the Museum of Mankind. The M.o.M. remained here until 1997, when the departure of the British Library for its new building freed up space at the British Museum in Bloomsbury. The neighbouring Royal Academy then wisely purchased the vacated building, commissioning Michael Hopkins & Partners to integrate it with Burlington House, but the Heritage Lottery Fund was not persuaded by the high cost of the conversion.

In 2008, the Royal Academy held a competition to design a new integration of the two buildings, which was won by David Chipperfield. In order to fund the transformation, the RA have leased No. 6 out to two galleries: Haunch of Venison from 2009 to 2011, and now the Pace Gallery. The Royal Academy hopes Chipperfield’s scheme will be implemented by the RA’s two-hundredth anniversary in 2018.

“The project will effectively double the area of public space available in the RA,” Building Design reports. “The upper-level galleries alone are two and a half times the size of the Sackler galleries. The question of how all this space will be programmed in the long term remains the subject of much debate within the RA and is no doubt being monitored closely by other institutions such as the ICA and Somerset House, for whom the emergence of such a venue may represent a considerable challenge. However, after more than a decade of frustrations, it now looks increasingly certain that 6 Burlington Gardens is set to form an integral part of the Royal Academy.”

THE MOST RECENT series of the ITV detective drama “Foyle’s War”, though set in London, was filmed entirely in Dublin. (Ah, those Bord Scannán incentives!). I’ve noticed a phenomenon in which something set in England but filmed in Ireland suffers from English stereotype overcompensation. What this entails is unnecessarily sticking noticeably English ‘things’ (double-decker bus, red pillarbox) into the frame when, if filmed in England, the directors might otherwise be satisfied without these subconscious emblems reassuring the viewer that they are not in fact in the country the programme was actually filmed in.

So two characters meeting on a street of Georgian houses will have a red post box shoved into some arbitrary place on the street to remind us we’re in jolly old England. Despite this, any devotées of the Georgian style will recognise the Irishness of the houses because of the subtle yet noticeable difference between the Georgian styles of, say, London, Edinburgh, Bath, and Dublin.

Anyhow, not to reveal too much of the plot of this latest series, but Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle is recruited into a post-war British intelligence gathering organisation. The exterior shots of the building used as this group’s headquarters is the Custom House on River Liffey in Dublin, only the show’s producers have digitally removed the building’s prominent dome, presumably in order to make it less distinctive and identifiable.

The coincidental thing is that the Custom House, completed in 1791, actually lost its dome during the War of Independence. In a propaganda coup, the Irish Republican Army seized this outpost of British administration on 25 May 1921 and set it alight. The Custom House burned for five whole days, with the unfortunate fodder for the flames being the public records held in the building — centuries of Irish history destroyed in a single unfortunate act.

The War of Independence and ensuing Civil War took a toll on Dublin’s public buildings, and when peace came the Free State government set about restoring the Custom House (and the Four Courts further up the river). The original dome and main façade of the Custom House were faced in Portland stone from England, the Dorset limestone popular in the cladding of numerous public buildings throughout Britain and Ireland. A combination of austerity and nationalism precluded the government from rebuilding the dome in Portland stone, so Ardbraccan limestone was used in its stead.

Alas, the Ardbraccan is noticeably darker than the Portland stone and the contrast isn’t particularly graceful. The other façades of the rather extensive building were faced in a local stone which fits fairly well with the Ardbraccan, but when the magnificent front of the Custom House is viewed from the opposite bank of the Liffey, the dome tends to look dirty or a bit unloved.

Still, the government was right to restore the dome when it could. The North Side has been the object of unending ridicule by the denizens of Dublin’s smarter southern bank of the Liffey, but for this grand monument to the height of Ireland’s period of Georgian grace to sit lacking its central flourish would have been an embarrassment to the entire city.

Victorian England went mad for the medieval, often neglecting or destroying buildings and structures of classical design along the way. Wren’s classical rood screen for Westminster Abbey is probably no great loss, but just imagine if his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, had been gothicised.

Just such was imagined by the architectural sketch artist C.A. Nicholson in two drawings he sent to the Architectural Record (albeit in the 1910s, not the Victorian era). Nicholson was inspired by an image printed in a previous issue of the Record showing the front of Peterborough Cathedral transformed into a classic design.

Of course before the Great Fire, Old St Paul’s was a Gothic cathedral.

The enormous church of S. Maria Maggiore stands on one of Rome’s seven famous hills. Originally the site was very unkempt, as can be seen in an old fresco painting in the Vatican. Later, the slopes were smoothed and articulated with a flight of steps up to the apse of the basilica. The many tourists who are brought to the church on sight-seeing tours hardly notice the unique character of the surroundings. They simply check off one of the starred numbers in their guide-books and hasten on to the next one. But they do not experience the place in the way some boys I saw there a few years ago did. I imagine they were pupils from a nearby monastery school. They had a recess at eleven o’clock and employed the time playing a very special kind of ball game on the broad terrace at the top of the stairs. It was apparently a kind of football but they also utilised the wall in the game, as in squash — a curved wall, which they played against with great virtuousity. When the ball was out, it was most decidedly out, bouncing down all the steps and rolling several hundred feet further on with an eager boy rushing after it, in and out among motor cars and Vespas down near the great obelisk.

I do not claim that these Italian youngsters learned more about architecture than the tourists did. But quite unconsciously they experienced certain basic elements of architecture: the horizontal planes and the vertical walls above the slopes. And they learned to play on these elements. As I sat in the shade watching them, I sensed the whole three-dimensional composition as never before. At a quarter past eleven the boys dashed off, shouting and laughing. The great basilica stood once more in silent grandeur.

The Salle des états in the Palais du Louvre

Among the numerous rituals of the ordinary visitor’s pilgrimage to Paris — trip up the Eiffel Tower, lunch at a tourist-trap café — braving the teeming hordes in the Louvre to view da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ ranks near the top. What very few of the camera-toting hordes realise is that they are shuffling through the room that once housed France’s parliament. The history of the Palais du Louvre is long, exceptional, and varied.

Originally built as a stern castle in the 1190s, the Louvre’s secure reputation led Louis IX to house the royal treasury there from the mid-thirteenth century. Charles V enlarged it in the fifteenth century to become a royal residence, while François I^er brought the grandeur of the Renaissance to the Louvre — as well as acquiring ‘La Gioconda’. In 1793, amidst the revolutionary tumult, part of the palace was opened to the public as the Musée du Louvre, but the Louvre has always housed a variety of institutions — the Ministry of Finance didn’t move out until 1983.

Napoleon III took as his official residence the Tuileries Palace which the Louvre was slowly enlarged towards over the centuries to incorporate. The Emperor needed a parliament chamber close at hand so he could easily address joint sittings of the Senate and the Corps législatif (as the lower house was called during the Second Empire) which opened the parliamentary year. By doing so at his residence, the Bonaparte emperor was following the example left by his kingly Bourbon predecessor Louis XVIII.

The architect Hector Lefuel incorporated the Salle des États — its name recalling the pre-revolutionary états généraux into the completion of the grand scheme completing the Louvre’s connection to the Tuileries. It was constructed between 1855 and 1857, when Napoleon III opened the legislative year in the grand hall.

Lefuel’s assistant was Richard Morris Hunt, an American who had risen through the ranks from the École des beaux-arts. So impressed was Lefuel by Hunt’s ability that it is believed the American was responsible for designing an entire section of the Louvre, the Pavillon de la Bibliothèque on the Rue de Rivoli. Hunt’s most prominent work, however, may be his much-loved façade for the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York.

In 1858, Charles-Louis Muller began painting ‘Imperial France Protecting the Arts, Industry, the Sciences, and Religion’ on the ceiling, with ‘The Triumph of Napoleon I’ and ‘The Triumph of Charlemagne’ on the flanking walls. The subject matter of these paintings served to legitimate the somewhat upstart dynasty by placing it in a longer French tradition of monarchy.

With the collapse of the Second Empire after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, the Third Republic had no state use for the Salle des états, so it was put at the disposition of the Musée du Louvre.

In 1886, the room was redesigned to house larger French paintings of the nineteenth century. This necessitated a complete overhaul of the Salle, and the consequent destruction of all its Napoleonic iconography and attributes. Representations of French artists were displayed in medallions arrayed around the entablature of the room.

During the First and Second World Wars, the works displayed here were mostly evacuated for safekeeping and the room used for storing frames. In between the wars, the Salle des états was home to the Delacroix retrospective of 1930.

After the war, new fashions took hold and in 1950 the room was gutted yet again. This time a restrained modern with pseudo-classical elements was employed, and Veronese’s Wedding at Cana became the star attraction of the room. In 1966, however, Veronese was upstaged by the arrival of da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ — La Gioconda — which hung on a side wall.

In 2001 the Mona Lisa was moved to the Grande Gallerie while the Salle was gutted for the third time. The Louvre engaged Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras in a €4.8 million renovation incorporating new security features and moving the most popular painting to a freestanding wall so the hordes of tourists could pass around it on either side.

Design chosen for St Petersburg’s new judicial quarter

While a vast and multifacted state, the Soviet Union was nonetheless one in which power was highly centralised, not just within one city — Moscow — but even within one complex of buildings, the Kremlin. For the past fourteen years, however, a St Petersburg boy — Vladimir Putin — has been the man at the helm of the ship of state, and while Moscow is still the top dog St Petersburg is increasingly stealing the limelight. The number of commercial bodies (several subsidiaries of Gazprom, for example) moving from Moscow to St Petersburg is growing, and even a few government departments and other entities have moved back to the old imperial capital.

Among these is the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which transferred to the old Senate and Synod buildings in St Petersburg in 2008. The Supreme Court and Higher Arbitration Courts have yet to make the move, however, and a scheme by architect Maxim Atayants has been chosen as the winner of the design competition for the new judicial quarter on the banks of the Neva.

The quarter includes a new Supreme Court building, the Judicial Department of the Armed Forces, a dance theatre, and a medical centre. Atayants’s Supreme Court is in a formal neoclassical style while the dance theatre will be executed in a more freehand version of the style.

The competition entry (below, in sepia tones) has already been altered, though I think the original design is superior, especially with regard to the theatre. The planned façade was influenced by the classical backdrops of ancient Roman theatres, while the newer design is classical by way of art nouveau.

Above: the original scheme; below: some updates to the design.

Lex semper intendit quod convenit rationi: ‘Law always intends what is agreeable to Reason’.

Nuwe lig op die Kaapse barok deur Dr Hans Fransen

A NEW BOOK BY Dr Hans Fransen, the leading authority on Cape Dutch architecture, intends to shed new light on the Cape Baroque style through an examination of the work of the sculptor Anton Anreith. Cape Baroque and the contribution of Anton Anreith offers us the hefty subtitle of ‘A stylistic survey of architectural decoration and the applied arts at the Cape of Good Hope 1652-1800’, covering the period of the Dutch East India Company’s rule at the Cape.

The author investigates (says the publisher’s note) whether, and to what extent, the surprisingly rich body of Cape material culture can be seen as part and parcel of the international Baroque: that ebullient style of painting, architecture, and design that swept across Europe and some of its spheres of influence. After a highly interesting account of the origins of the Baroque in Italy and of its development in other parts of the world, the author concludes that ‘Cape Baroque’ does indeed form part of this. But he also points out that it has a very distinctive character of its own.

The book of 180 pages contains over 200 illustrations, mostly from the author himself, whose other works include The Old Towns and Villages of the Cape, The Old Buildings of the Cape, Drie Eeue Kuns in Suid-Afrika, and the introduction to A Cape Camera, the book illustrating the photography of early Cape photographer Arthur Elliott.

The sculptor Anreith, born in Germany at Riegel between the Rhine and the foothills of the Black Forest, was the finest and most florid artist of the Baroque in the Cape of Good Hope. His exceptional work on the pulpit of the Lutheran Church in Cape Town provoked the envy of the more prominent Dutch Reformed congregation, who quickly commissioned Anreith to carve an even more ornate pulpit for the Groote Kerk.

United Nations Headquarters, New York

AMONG THE LEGACIES of my New York childhood is a sentimental fondness for the United Nations, and especially for the stylish swank of its headquarters at Turtle Bay in Manhattan. The name of the small neighbourhood originates (scholars tell us) not from the turtles which were once abundant upon the shores of the island and its environs but rather from a small inlet shaped, in the eyes of the old New Netherlanders, like a particular type of bent or curved blade called a deutal knife in Dutch. The woods and meadows surrounding Deutal Bay were easily rechristened as Turtle Bay once the English established their ascendancy and New Amsterdam became New York.

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the tiny port founded at the bottom tip of Manhattan grew further and further up the island, swallowing up the old colonial villages like Greenwich, Bloemendal, and Haarlem, or farms like Turtle Bay, Inclenberg, and Kip’s Bay, until as today there is just one giant urban mass stretching from the Battery at the bottom tip of the island all the way to Spuyten Duyvil at the top.

While New Yorkers like to think that there is no possible competitor to the city’s status as capital of the world, there was of course a great debate over where the United Nations should be based. Geneva was an obvious candidate, as the beautiful art-deco Palais des Nations provided a ready-made home for an international organisation. The fathers of the UN, however, did not want to associate themselves so closely with the failure of the old League of Nations the Palais was built for, and so the Geneva option was nixed.

Given the shifting balance of world power, it was thought a New World site might be a wiser choice than a European location. Quebec, as I have written previously, was an obvious possibility as the city is a beautiful melange of Old World and New, and for Europeans was easily accessible by passenger liner. Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific states, however, were in favour of San Francisco for geographic reasons to their obvious benefit, and cited the Californian city’s hosting the 1945 Conference on International Organisation which brought forth the UN Charter.

Fears that the United States would refuse to participate fully in the UN (as with the League of Nations of old) almost guaranteed that the US permanently hosting the world body in order to solidify American resolve in the UN’s favour, but the squabble over precisely where dragged on. The Rockefeller family intervened by offering to the fledgling United Nations Organisation, at no cost whatsoever, a large riparian site at Turtle Bay on the banks of the East River, largely consisting of slaughterhouses at the time. Settled then, but what would the complex look like?

The UN commissioned an international panel of architects chaired by America’s own Walter Harrison (the Rockefeller family’s house architect, as it happened) which among others included Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Sven Markelius. With eleven different architects from eleven different countries — Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay — one can imagine the squabbling that erupted. Eventually Harrison adjudicated between two overarching concepts, one by Le Corbusier and the other by Niemeyer. The strong, heavy block of Le Corbusier’s Secretariat tower was balanced by the smooth, sweeping lines of Niemeyer’s General Assembly building.

Construction began in 1948 and the United Nations Headquarters opened for business in 1952, with its promenade of poles flying the flag of each of the organisation’s member states — it seemed a new pole went up every week in the early 1990s when geopolitical turmoil added to the number of countries in the world.

The interiors have only been altered slightly here and there over the decades — after all, any change would require a broad agreement from a wide variety of countries. This means that a clean and crisp 1950s modernism has prevailed overall, alas partly undone by recent updates.

I’ll be the first to admit renovation was much needed — some of the Secretariat offices were bordering on the decrepit — but renovations in the public areas have unfortunately seen the interpolation of cheaper furniture of a more recent vintage that fails to fit in with the building’s aesthetic.

Even with this reservation, most of the refit has been a restoration not a redesign, and the building harks back to the 1950s — New York’s last glorious decade when high culture and stylistic excellence matched, before the decades-long crime-ridden descent into dystopia and the following the Giuliani renaissance (itself a dead-cat-bounce, in my opinion).

My favourite room in the whole complex is undoubtedly the most important: the General Assembly chamber. A mere glance is enough to confirm the hand of Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer, and the Assembly chamber is to my mind a much finer design than his later plenary chambers for the national legislature at Brasilia.

The massive emblem surrounded by gold behind the presidential dais has become iconic, as seen here with India’s Nehru addressing the General Assembly. Originally the coats of arms or emblems of the 51 member states were to sit ensconced in circles behind the giant globe-and-laurels, but it was soon envisaged that the prospective expansion of UN membership would make this cumbersome to keep up to date, and so much more suitably we have the sharp simple gold instead.

Some years ago I was meeting Álvaro de Soto (at the time an Under-Secretary General of the UN) for lunch at the Delegates Dining Room and he had one of the guards let us in to the empty General Assembly chamber beforehand for a proper wander round. Sitting down in one of the seats reserved for the United Republic of Tanzania, the country whose deftly chosen official name allows it to sit in between the United Kingdom and the United States of America and overhear all the juiciest gossip, I gave a friendly glance to the separate section on the right where such friendly observers as the Holy See and the Order of Malta have their seats.

The Trusteeship Council chamber formerly hosted meetings of the UN body devoted to decolonisation but as just about every colony worldwide has either achieved independence or enjoys self-government, the Council has fallen into abeyance. (Its abolition, however, would require too complicated a procedure, so it still exists, albeit only with a President and Vice-President for official purposes.) The room was designed by the Danish architect Finn Juhl, and Queen Margrethe II paid a visit during the recent three-year restoration to inspect progress.

The Security Council chamber was donated by Norway and designed by their own Arnstein Arneberg. Their are vast windows on either side of the familiar central mural which let in natural light, but unfortunately the massive curtains tend to be drawn even for the Security Council’s daytime sittings, which gives the chamber a dark and secretive feel.

Denmark… Norway… the Scandinavian influence on UN Headquarters is completed by the library named after Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia while serving as Secretary-General. Hammarskjöld was influential in securing resources for the United Nations International Library, and it was renamed for him when the addition housing it was officially opened a month after his death in 1961.

Over the years, member states have donated various items and works of art, such as the tapestry above given by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States has two works of art at the UN headquarters, both of which are connected to my old school, Thornton-Donovan in the Huguenot city of New Rochelle.

The first is ‘The Golden Rule’, a mosaic by the popular illustrator and artist Norman Rockwell. The earlier part of the artist’s career was spent in New Rochelle, and Rockwell supposedly used children from our small private school as models for his preliminary studies for the mosaic.

The other American artwork at the UN is the mural ‘Titans’ by Lumen Martin Winter, whose home and studio have since been incorporated into Thornton-Donovan’s leafy campus. I remember as a boy at school wandering through the cellar of the late artist’s former house, foraging through sketches, models for bas-reliefs, and other such accoutrements — a study for Winter’s modern crucifixion scene was particularly arresting.

Which brings us to the most important work of art — for what it signifies — donated as a gift to the United Nations by the Soviet Union in its final days. Created from disused American and Soviet missiles, Zurab Tsereteli’s sculpture ‘Good Defeats Evil’ depicts Saint George slaying the dragon. That the crumbling atheistic state finally identified ‘good’ with the cross of Christ gives the donation an almost Milvian Bridge significance.

Despite the world-changing moment of the Soviet collapse, history (as even Mr Fukuyama now admits) has not ended, and both the United Nations organisation and building will continue to evolve. South Sudan, Montenegro, and East Timor are the most recent additions to the flagpoles along First Avenue, and I dare say there will be additions and subtractions yet to come.

When the UN Headquarters and Lever House (its exact contemporary on Park Avenue) were built they were bright and bold portents of the future contrasting handsomely with the brick and stoneclad buildings that made up the overwhelming preponderance of Manhattan structures at the time. Alas, Lever House and the UNHQ were followed by a thousand cheap and poor imitations so that the isle is awash with boring and tawdry glass-plated towers, which lessens the impact of these stately modernist numbers.

But for all these foibles, the UNHQ still exudes a certain 1950s swank that continues to endear, and serves as a welcome reminder of the swansong decade of the capital of the world.

The old and new buildings of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts

SINCE 1682, the Hague has been home to the oldest art school in the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten or Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The school has its origins in the civic corporations of the late medieval period. The Guild of Saint Luke incorporated all the artists of the Hague, and later from this group emerged a self-selecting gang of painters and sculptors who founded themselves as the Pictura Brotherhood. This fraternity in turn founded an academy of art which on its 275th anniversary was granted the royal patronage and name.

Having had previous quarters in the Korenbeurs and the Boterwaag, the Academy engaged the architect Zeger Reyers (or Reijers) to design its own building in the Prinsessegracht in 1839 (above, top). This neo-classical temple to the arts was very much in keeping with the French academic tradition which the school practised at the time, but in later years this fashion faded. Just before the Second World War, the barbarians sacked the temple and erected in its place a Bauhaus-style box (below).

Like all too many changes, it was not an improvement. The functionality of space afforded by the new building was doubtless welcome, but the task could have been achieved without the wanton destruction of a beautiful classical building and an important part of the Hague’s architectural evolution. Evidence of this is provided by the new masters’ keeping much of the galleries of the old building behind the new Bauhaus exterior, while stripping down much of the interior’s classical detail.

The contrast between the Prinsessegracht of old and of new is not a felicitous one. All rather insensitive and scandalous, if you ask me.

Above: The Prinsessegracht in 1930. Below: The same in 1950.

Stumbled upon the website of a firm called Thameside Media whose architectural photographer, Michael Ellis, has done some superb work in capturing English churches on film (metaphorical film, I suppose, now that the world has gone digital).