French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series: Jean-Philippe Garric (Professor of History of Architecture, University of Paris)

The Department of Art History is pleased to present the next installment of our French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series, featuring Prof. Jean-Philippe Garric of the University of Paris.

"Cointeraux, Lequeux and Percier: Three Architects Across the Revolution"
When: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 - 4:30pm
Where: Paul Cadario Conference Centre, Craft Chapter House, University College

Reception to follow.

Abstract:

With his famous essay Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeux (1952), Emil Kaufmann widely contributed to built-up the historiography of French architecture around 1800 and to shape the researches of the second half off the twentieth century. His choice to identify the production of the three protagonist as “revolutionary”, beyond every political involvement on their part, and even if they had often work for aristocratic sponsors, links their artistic expressions with the historical events. In one way, the Austrian historian, according to a Twentieth century’s concept, transforms them committed artists.

Based on researches held during the last decade, the alternative trio presented in this conference relies instead on biographic and historical elements. Being or not “revolutionary”, François Cointeraux (1740-1830), Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826) and Charles Percier (1764-1838) went through the Revolution and their lives, as artist and as men, had been powerfully impacted by it. In different ways their three parcourses begun in the 1780s and, successful or not, they had to adapt to a quickly changing reality.

Their achievements and their fields of intervention are also of different kinds, although one could say that they are three “architects of the book”, with a strong cultural dimension. They don’t embody a style, or not even the formal expression of a particular moment, but the diversity of what could potentially be “architecture” at the beginning of a news area of uncertainty, full of astonishing attempts, great realizations and admirable failures.

Bio:

Jean-Philippe Garric was born in Toulouse (France) in 1961. After graduating in architecture at the school of architecture of Toulouse in 1985, he moved to Paris and begun to work in the field of architectural culture, at the Institue Français d’Architecture (Paris). Selected as a Fellow at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici), he moved to Rome in 1987, staying six years abroad before he returned to Paris in 1993. At that time, he begun to teach in various school of architecture in France, while preparing a PhD, under the supervision of Françoise Choay. This was published in 2004 under the title Recueils d’Italie. Les modèles italiens dans les livres d’architecture français, he studies the publication in France of Italian architectural models, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, but with a focus between 1800 and 1850, which give a central positionn to the architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine. Associated Professor in 2000 at the school of Architecture of Normandie, and then at the school of Architecture of Paris-Belleville (2004) he went on studying the history of books and theory of architecture and in 2006 he was elected advisor for History of architecture at the Instut national d’histoire de l’art, where he stayed until 2013.

Invited in 2009 by the Bard Graduate Center to prepare an exhibitioon dedicated to Charles Percier, he worked for various years on this personality to which he dedicated an important number of publications. After the exhibition was presented at NY and then at Fontainebleau, he prepared another exhibition dedicated to Jean Jacques Lequeu, presented at the Petit Palais in 2018, and further a book that deals with the architectural drawind, based on the collections of architectural drawings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In parallel with these works widely focused on architectural drawing between 1770 and 1850, he pursued researched dedicated to architectural education and to rural architecture during the same period et particularly to François Cointeraux the first theoretician of the construction in adobe and rammed earth.

Elected full professor at the university of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2013 he has been strongly engaged in the supervision of doctoral researches that address he field and period of research and beyond.
He has been invited in various universities as an invited professor, researcher or lecturer.

He is currently working on new research projects, included the “architects of the book” in France during the long nineteenth century and the “photo-inventions of Rome” during the first decades of photography (1840-1880).