Architecture Review
A Poetry Grounded in Gravity and Air
‘Henri Labrouste,’ at the Museum of Modern Art
Georges Fessy
Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light
Domes hover atop a forest of thin iron columns in the reading room at
the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a central focus of an exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art. More Photos »
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: March 13, 2013
“Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,”
at the Museum of Modern Art, is elegant and astringent, like
Labrouste’s work. The name may not ring a bell, but don’t let that stop
you from seeing the show. It is gorgeous.
Multimedia
Michel Nguyen
A view of the reading room in Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. More Photos »
Labrouste died in 1875, at 74, having left behind two of the great
buildings of the 19th century, the Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève and the
Bibliothèque Nationale, miracles of stone, iron and glass construction. I
found it instructive to hear a historian, in a video accompanying the
show, recall growing up like most French intellectuals during the 1950s
and ’60s and lumping Labrouste in with all the other unfashionable
detritus of 19th-century bourgeois culture. “Good” architectural taste
skipped over the 1800s.
Fresh eyes were clearly required. Fortunately a generation of young
Americans, among them the Harvard professor Neil Levine, who more than
anyone else wrote
Labrouste back into architectural history, had landed in Paris by the
late ’60s. These Americans recognized Labrouste as a provocateur and
poet with a pen and pencil whose influence reverberated across the
centuries.
The exhibition’s arrival seems almost uncanny in the midst of the debate
over the renovation of Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library
building at 42nd Street, whose iron book stacks derive from Labrouste’s.
Library officials have proposed removing those historic stacks, which
support the main reading room, and replacing them with a circulating
branch to be designed by Norman Foster. The stacks, they say, are too
dilapidated and unsuited to be modernized.
But Labrouste’s even-older stacks at the Bibliothèque Nationale have
recently been outfitted with modern climate controls and fireproofing
and will be opened to the reading public. The exhibition’s last room
greets visitors with a large photomural of that space — a pointed rebuke
to those New York library officials who haven’t adequately justified
their scheme and might now want to investigate more closely what Paris
is doing.
The MoMA show is organized, with obvious love, by Barry Bergdoll, the
museum’s chief curator of architecture, along with Corinne Bélier of the
Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and Marc Le Coeur of the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris, where the exhibition started. For Mr. Bergdoll, a scholar of
19th-century architecture, it renews the Modern’s commitment, dating
back at least to its groundbreaking Beaux-Arts survey nearly 40 years
ago, to explore the roots of Modernism.
There are wonderful touches. Mr. Bergdoll has commissioned drafting
tables, fashioned after Labrouste’s furniture designs at Ste.-Geneviève,
on which drawings are displayed. They’re ideal for studying works on
paper. The architectural models constructed for the show could be a
little more instructive, but’s hard to picture a finer selection of
drawings. Those in the opening gallery, from Labrouste’s time in Italy,
are a reminder of what great draftsmanship used to look like. It’s too
bad that the architectural models made for the show aren’t equally
impressive.
I’m sorry we don’t see more in the way of buildings aside from the
libraries. Labrouste designed private residences in various traditional
styles. The implication of their absence — that, forced to earn a
living, he took on conventional commissions — would belie his reputation
for intransigence. A sober and proud man, he bowed to nobody. “He had
absolute integrity and devotion to his art,” is how Mr. Levine phrased
it in a recent conversation. “He never did a thing he didn’t want to
do.”
So what we get at MoMA is pretty much the Labrouste whom the critic Sigfried Giedion
identified the better part of a century ago as a proto-modernist
engineer-architect, a pioneer of iron construction. While that resonates
Labrouste seems at least as interesting today for the complexity of his
thinking. In our era of starchitects he makes an instructive case for
his unwillingness to compromise, his dedication to function, his
decorative originality and his unorthodox hybrid aesthetic, which
married industry to classicism.
Dominique Perrault, the designer of France’s new, little-loved national
library in eastern Paris, calls him a “conceptual” architect, “furiously
contemporary.” With the Ste.-Geneviève library, he notes, Labrouste
hewed to a strategy “of outside and inside, of roof, and of light” that
redefined essential parts of a building. In the strict separation
between the library’s severe stone facade and its airy, light-filled
reading room, Mr. Perrault sees an “absolutely radical” mentality.
It’s a compelling thought. The gravity of Ste.-Geneviève’s exterior, as
Mr. Levine has pointed out, comes from the minimalism of its design:
unbroken ledges run the length of the long facade at the cornice and
between the two floors, with simple stone garlands seemingly strung from
the lower ledge over iron roundels, or knobs. Unadorned arched windows
make the only breaks in the wall along the ground floor, save for the
front door.
The facade’s upper story, predicting the architecture of the reading
room that it encloses, presents a shallow arcade of arches containing a
grid of plaques inscribed with the names of 810 writers. They are listed
in rows beneath the large lunette windows, the reading room’s
clerestories. Like those among the garlands below, the roundels in the
spandrels between the windows are bolts and tie rods for the floor
trusses and the vaults of the iron structure inside. Labrouste, in
effect, makes the structural skeleton of the building its decorative
motif, inside and out.
You could say the library facade acts as a billboard whose
embellishments announce the building’s content and material
construction: a “decorated shed,” as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown defined those sign-covered casinos along the strip in Las Vegas,
which flipped the bird at conventional high taste.
At the same time Labrouste was reinventing civic space as a citizens’
palace where people could read and meet. He spent a dozen years, from
1838 to 1850, cooking up the language. In lieu of the frescoes and
biblical scenes fashioned in stained glass or carved into statues and
column capitals that dominated public architecture he used books and
iron as decorative instruments.
Achille Hermant, a young French architect, spoke for many others when he
found the results cold. “The character of a building is not measured
only by the use for which it is intended,” he wrote. “Everything that is
true is not necessarily beautiful.”
That is true. But the place is beautiful. Its long double bay — divided
by a central row of slender iron columns that sprout from stone pillars,
with bookshelves all around — feels austere and mysterious. The
approach involves a procession, from the square outside through the
downstairs vestibule, its ceiling painted sky blue, faux Pompeiian
landscapes on the walls and a grid of square stone piers supporting iron
arches that anticipate what’s above. Then comes the reading room, as
exalted and democratic as the city’s then-new train stations, but
reticent, hushed.
After Ste.-Geneviève, Labrouste labored for the last 21 years of his
life on the Bibliothèque Nationale, its square reading room a
light-bathed hive of nine domes hovering atop a forest of 33-foot-high
thin iron columns. Where windows don’t pierce the upper walls, painted
landscapes elaborate on the pastoral theme, with the iron vault of the
book stacks, also skylighted, visible to readers through a tall glass
wall and separated by a monumental archway.
Labrouste dedicated most of his working life, on a government wage, to
works of public architecture. He transcended materials to arrive at
functional buildings of an ethereal delicacy. Nothing was too small for
his attention. After 12 years Ste.-Geneviève came in under budget.
Labrouste told the minister in charge the news and won permission to
switch out the cast-iron front door for a bronze one.
A perfectionist to the last.
Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.
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