The architectural “return of historicism” that so infuriated Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in the mid-1960s coincided, not surprisingly, with an invigorated scholarly interest in nineteenth-century architecture, which he greeted quite enthusiastically. Pevsner’s divided reaction to this apparently spontaneous interdisciplinary coincidence illuminates a fundamental contradiction that I find especially acute in the American variant of the postmodernist ethos. And I believe that the book under review, although a work of unquestionably serious scholarship, unintentionally illustrates this paradox.

In the United States, the event that more or less catapulted postmodernist architectural history to broad public attention was the 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of an enormous selection of nineteenth-century student projects from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts curated by the late Arthur Drexler. In addition to its mordant critique of contemporary modernist architecture and theory, the catalog contained a collection of revealing—and at times brilliant—essays by three young scholars: Neil Levine, Richard Chafee, and David Van Zanten. At the time, Van Zanten was the only scholar who had completed his dissertation and thus served, according to one of them, as the vital force binding the academic to the museological enterprise. Given the exhibition’s adamantly polemical tone, it is noteworthy that his essay shunned the dispute. The same is also true of Chafee’s fastidiously factual, and stunningly informative, contribution. Levine’s essay, by contrast, while teeming with flashing insights and dazzlingly synthetic detective work, explicitly offered refined intellectual ammunition to the postmodern movement. This brilliant performance, along with a very small handful of shorter essays, was apparently sufficient to enable him to secure tenure at Harvard University; it was also sufficient to whip up a foaming tide of envy among colleagues who felt that Levine’s canniness compromised the integrity of his (and their) status as “disinterested” scholars. In effect, the exhibition became something of a cause célèbre despite the scrupulous high-mindedness of Chafee and Van Zanten.

I must confess that Levine’s writings impress me much in the same manner as Heinrich Wölfflin’s: initially ravished by the sheer attractiveness of the author’s rhetorical brilliance and compelling visuals, I retreat to a position of reflexive apprehension. For this reason, I have always found Van Zanten’s comparatively wooden prose and methodical thoroughness more assuring, more comforting, more reliable. Although Levine subsequently turned his attention to Frank Lloyd Wright, Van Zanten maintained his interest in French architecture and continued to publish prolifically—in marked contrast to Levine. But compared to Van Zanten’s award-winning Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc and Vaudoyer of 1987, his Building Paris is something of a disappointment.

In Building Paris, Van Zanten, now Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, has set out to address “the institutional control of the monumental form of Paris” by examining the role played by the government’s architectural “services.” Ensconced for months at a time in state archives, Van Zanten has taken nearly a decade to compose this fine-grained picture of the legal footing, institutional trajectory, and built consequences of agencies such as the Bâtiments Civils, the Travaux d’Architectures de la Ville de Paris, the Edifices Diocésains, and the Commission des Monuments Historiques. Van Zanten partially strips these purely bureaucratic entities of their anonymity by tracing the careers of four men (Fontaine, Baltard, Viollet-le-Duc, and Garnier) whose service as government architects decisively altered the built fabric of the capital. In so doing, Van Zanten has made an important contribution to our understanding of how Paris acquired its distinctively rhythmic massing and unique spatial cadences. The text is liberally laced with choice passages from contemporary fiction (primarily Zola) that buttress his account of the interplay between Paris-as-constructed and Paris-as-experienced.

In contrast to Designing Paris’s emphasis on design principles, Building Paris treats “design principles as professional strategies and, as such, things much more complex, shifting, and elaborately negotiated.” But the institutional crystals tumbling in the academic kaleidoscope that Van Zanten finds so endlessly fascinating, unfortunately, display only a few basic patterns. Despite his repeated declarations that his subject is “infinitely complex and fluid,” the metropolis’s inimitably soothing uniformity was only achieved through a cascading series of trade-offs between a bureaucratic vision of an appropriate urban template and matters of evolving taste and artistic license, with both sides of the equation worthy of sustained attention. But the desire to attend to the history of the profession—excuse me, professional strategies—as evidenced in the archival records, befits an age when an entire generation pursues careers as works of art. In this sense, Building Paris is the reductio ad absurdum of the thrall of state-sponsored professional specialization.

The book does contain a multitude of solid contributions to the systematic understanding of Parisian urbanism that have somehow escaped earlier writers. His revisionist discussion of the 1830 Romantics alone represents an important contribution to our understanding of Beaux-Arts architectural politics. Van Zanten also draws the useful if blunt distinction between “foreground” and “background” architectural tasks, with foreground buildings “representing” governmental authority and the background comprised of everything else: institutional tasks, like hospitals and prisons, and private sector commissions. I would have preferred treating institutional projects as a “middle ground”; this might have disencumbered the background concept from competing and often conflicting design activities. Finally, Van Zanten’s discussion of the fundamentally ceremonial, scenographic nature of Parisian urbanism— in which sites are treated as tableaux made up of “shaped, telescoping spaces”—is outstanding. His novel treatment of these topics, and the causes for the paradoxical interplay of interior splendor and exterior restraint, significantly improves our understanding of European urbanism as a whole.

According to Van Zanten, private commissions, while offering the potential of considerably higher financial gain, could not compete with the prestige and incentives offered by government service—and by the same token, without an official apparatus recording the distribution of prizes, assignments, and official necrologies, private architectural practice offers the archival researcher very little to track. Of course, this methodological predisposition leads to some rather strained conclusions, including his declaration that “propelled by the economic boom of the Second Empire … the increasing numbers of [architectural functionaries] effectively became its designers much more than the architects of the individual background buildings.” Statistically, one suspects that Van Zanten’s preference for tackling large state commissions, while more manageable from a researcher’s point of view, leaves the vast bulk of Parisian building activity almost wholly untouched, or touched by similar generalizations. Here, title betrays content.

This is the nub of the paradox mentioned above: Van Zanten is uneasy with his own attraction to the mechanisms of what he calls the “architecture of authority.” One indication is his clarity about the aesthetic merits of capitalism: sneers for the prospects offered by the “consumerist fantasyland” in the quartier de l’Opéra, disgust for the “fantasy world of interior space devoted to ritual consumption,” and contempt for “that peculiar bourgeois play of morality amid splendor.” In contrast, he lauds the products of the state architectural apparatus as an architecture of “compromise” and “diplomacy.” These positions reveal an unresolved ideological conflict regarding the nature of freedom and constraint. Indeed, it is the dynamic and inevitable tension between individual creativity and cultural convention that makes the study of architecture perpetually fascinating to so many non-architects. But when one’s desires interfere with one’s judgment, substantive problems multiply. That explains why episodes of design exchanges such as that between Félix Duban (an agent of the regime) and Charles Garnier (architect of the now ancien Opéra) are more instructive than Van Zanten can imagine; indeed, a series of case studies of such exchanges would have yielded a far more engaging account.

Van Zanten, of course, is very much in synch with the increasingly popular (and vulgar) theory-saturated brand of art-historical scholarship now proffered virtually everywhere. In Building Paris, this kind of thinking results in some relatively silly errors, like confusing Horeau’s and Jourdain’s realism for utopianism or the belief that empathy-based theories have a French origin; it also results in some equally silly but persistent and annoying verbal tricks, such as Van Zanten’s habit of seeing “inflections” everywhere. But at its worst, as Hayek teaches, naïve statism inevitably leads in the opposite direction of its avowed intentions. In Van Zanten’s case, it allows him to adopt a promiscuously anti-architectural, anti-individualist trope as his methodological rallying point: the notion of leveling. He assures us that the “conventional history [of nineteenth-century French architecture] focuses on personalities” and declares his intention to “flatten out the topography of the historical personalities and position them in the institutional structure so the original center points might be seen.” Van Zanten also characterizes his enterprise as “level[ing] the received topography of nineteenth-century French architecture flat again [sic].” It is as if the design and experience of architecture are not, in their most essential sense, profoundly individual events—what I would call truly “original center points.” In both cases, it is assumed that we already know the cast of characters; I would venture to guess that in reality most people are far more familiar with the monuments than with the architects. There is some hope, however, for Van Zanten states that:  

the greatest objection one might make to this narrative is the slight coverage we could offer of private construction’s role. This is a weakness widespread in contemporary building history and practice, the misapprehension that one can understand and command architecture by controlling government authority, when the real challenge seems to be to learn to ride the unbroken horses of corporate business and real estate development.

Suggesting that this objection may “frame the volume that should follow,” he renders Building Paris an excruciatingly difficult and perhaps unnecessary bridge between research projects.

As it stands now, though, Van Zanten’s research program reveals a profound displacement of the locus of creativity from individuals to institutions, and it is likely that a scholar who feels that “one of the great attractions of the architecture of authority is its disconnection from everyday life, which leaves room for the most elaborate and outrageous colonizations” is constitutionally incapable of discerning value in private affairs. In his world, individuals become worthy of attention only when they shed light on the larger, aggregate, and impersonal forces of professional herds. And this dilemma has always struck me as a contradiction in the heart of “official” postmodernism: while public institutions could foster the humane virtues of a classical training, they could not digest genius. Thus, when a scholar like Van Zanten delves into this material, he is sympathetic with the aesthetic products of the institution but ultimately feels hamstrung by the Foucauldian censure against the policelike functioning of any such organization as an unqualified threat to creative freedom. On the other side of the coin, when Neil Levine finds a bona fide genius like Henri Labrouste, the enemy’s script—in this instance, the high modernist penchant for romanticizing artistic heroes who defy the boobs and the bureaucrats—is appropriated and rewritten with new names and different aesthetic objectives. Of Wright, Levine’s newest hero, we read in the conclusion to his recently published monograph that “we have good reason to regard him as the Other of this century—not the antimodern traditionalist … but the modernist’s double and complement.” For both Levine and now Van Zanten, political motives are denied even while a political agenda is advanced and it is either wishful thinking, childish obstinacy, or plain stupidity that keeps one blind to this reality.

Whether based in overweening collectivism or impious hagiography, theory-enriched architectural history has fallen prey to the same ideologically driven desire to force and polarize the facts that caused the revolt against modernism in the first place. I suspect that even the late Sir Nikolaus, no enemy of the collectivist mentality himself, would be rather concerned about this state of affairs.

Notes
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See The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Neil Levine (Princeton University Press, 524 pages, $85). Go back to the text.

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