Architectural History Working Group: Imitating Italy (w/ Prof. Jean-Philippe Garric, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

The Architectural History Working group is pleased to present our inaugural meeting of 2024, featuring a talk by Prof. Jean-Philippe Garric (Professor, History of Architecture, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Imitating Italy: Architectural Design and the Idea of Model in the French Nineteenth Century

This event will take place in-person and hybrid via Zoom.

Zoom Meeting ID: 878 1242 8728
Zoom Passcode: 442690

Discussion Description:

Beyond the imitation of Greco-Roman Antiquity that remains, all along the Nineteenth century, the main reference for the French architects, a great variety of architectures present on the soil of Italy, Etruscan or Renaissance, Baroque or Medieval, comes to nourish the activity of design project of the workshops of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

This wide corpus offers a wide diversity of models, but what does it means? In the process of imitation – modern architecture belongs to the arts of imitation – the first and the simplest definition of an architectural model is quite mechanical: a scheme that describe the shape of a building and can be reproduce and adapt to form a new design. In this way the publication of engraved repertories of Italian buildings represents a first important contribution. But these models are not the buildings themselves, rather a graphic elaborated appropriations and transpositions, which already engage the process of conception. Furthermore, these books result of choices guided by contemporary expectations: the young French architects discover in Italy what they were willing to find there.

Then we can borrow to the theory of reception the idea that it’s the design activity that finally makes of an image a model. The architectural models become so not only because they are published in this purpose, but because they are used as though. And this use can widely vary, from a straight copy to an inconscient inspiration: another level of complexity that includes the fact that an image may be considered as simple figure, but also as a symbolic form with strong connotations.

This informal presentation, based on a series of study cases, will propose a discussion around the idea of model in architecture, as a central element of the process of creation.

Caption of the illustration: Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, Perspective of a vestibule, Strada Felice in Rome, in Palais, maisons et autres édifices dessinés à Rome, 1798.