The Printed and the Built

Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century

Mari Hvattum, Anne Hultzsch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350038394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Printed and the Built explores the intricate relationship between architecture and printed media in the fast-changing nineteenth century. Publication history is a rapidly expanding scholarly field which has profoundly influenced architectural history in recent years. Yet, while groundbreaking work has been done on architecture and printing in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the twentieth century, the nineteenth century has received little attention. This is the omission that The Printed and the Built seeks to address, thus filling a significant gap in the understanding of architecture's cultural history. Lavishly illustrated with colourful and eclectic visual material, from panoramas to printed ephemera, adverts, penny magazines, early photography, and even crime reportage, The Printed and the Built consists of five in-depth thematic essays accompanied by 25 short pieces, each examining a particular printed form. Altogether, they illustrate how new genres communicated architecture to a mass audience, setting the stage for the modern architectural era.

PART ONE

Architecture and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century

‘The Public Square of the Modern Age’: Architecture and the Rise of the Illustrated Press in the Early Nineteenth Century

Barry Bergdoll

The relationships between architecture, the printed page and self-conscious social reform were perhaps never pursued with as much determination and consequence as in the 1830s and 1840s. The period was marked not only by revolutions in both printing and building technology, but also by one of fundamental political change situated between the revolutions of 1839 and 1848 on the continent and the debates over the Reform Laws in Great Britain. Looking back at my study of nearly twenty years ago, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (1994),¹ in which a central chapter dealt with the relationship between an architect determined to craft a new approach to architecture as a reflection not of timeless values but of a changing present and the socially committed forays into publishing of a group of former Saint-Simonians in the 1830s and 1840s, I am struck both by how self-aware the figures I want to discuss in this chapter were by their position at a moment of seminal change and by how, in retrospect, my own scholarship of that time came at a moment of equally sweeping change, namely the digital revolution brought on by the rise of the personal computer and the launching of the internet. Vaudoyer, along with his friends and contemporaries Léonce Reynaud and Albert Lenoir, understood his mission in architecture to be equally realizable in publishing historical accounts of architecture’s evolution in relationship to discernible historical laws and to creating buildings that could respond directly to an awareness of the changing nature of historical realities. The mottos of this alliance between new forms of publication – notably the illustrated popular press – and new notions of architectural expression were contained in two eloquent phrases that became veritable mantras for the nexus of artists and social reformers who conceived the French illustrated press. Architecture, exclaimed Vaudoyer’s frequent companion in arms, the literary critic Hippolyte Fortoul, has always been and will continue to be la veritable écriture des peuples,² and the press in its rapidly changing forms could lay claim to being la place publique des grandes nations de l’âge moderne.³ Long before the metaphors of the internet – and more recently social media – as agora or forum, then, the technological changes of printing in the nineteenth century were viewed as dispersed versions of the places of social interchange and identity of past centuries when those possibilities were embodied in concrete places and built form.

No less did my 1994 book arrive at the cusp of another great paradigm shift. Written as a doctoral thesis in the 1980s, my research notes took the form of handwritten notes on index cards and of file after file of photocopies of documents and of photographic negatives of architectural drawings. I acquired my first personal computer in 1985, which took up more than one half of my desk surface, as I was completing the dissertation, figuring that it would cost as much to hire a typist for a perfect manuscript copy following university regulations as it would to purchase a personal computer and take the time to learn word processing as I edited my text, first typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter, then on a PC in an early version of Microsoft Word. There was no e-mail to facilitate exchanges about acquiring photographs, no digital images to facilitate transfer, no computer searchable online databases even. All of that arrived fast and furious in the years following the publication of the book derived from the dissertation in 1994. An online history of the Internet traces its roots back to the 1950s – the favoured era of study of much of architectural history at the moment – but acknowledges that ‘Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the 20 years since 1995, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, to over one third of the world population’.⁴ But, of course, like much on the internet it is nearly impossible to date that statement by anything but internal textual evidence – as in old written documents without a date – nor to tell when it was placed on the web and in what context, leading to a kind of timeless timeliness that is one of the characteristics of the internet. On the other hand, in comparison to research in the early 1990s, I am struck by how it is now possible to undertake types of research that were all but unimaginable two decades ago and that at a speed that makes me wonder if anyone could ever again adjust to taking handwritten notes in archives where the average delivery time of documents was three to four hours, and to the speed of trips to the library to double-check information in books that required first a trip through the card catalogue to find a call number and then often a two-day delay while the book was paged from off-site storage. Every month, it seems, brings hundreds and hundreds of newly searchable compilations of documents to the internet, and often documents of the sort that used to be relegated to the library annex or to scratchy microfilm that one could spend hours reeling through a creaky reader. Today there is no need for such fishing expeditions to see if a name ever appeared in a periodical, going by the annual indexes some published, but rather in ever more searchable scanned documents we are afforded an instant direction to the very page in question. Often the relevant passage is already highlighted in yellow. What, of course, gets lost is the context and the texture of everything from the paper of the page to the content of the overall issue or the sequence of issues in which an article appears. But there is no doubt that we are living in a period of ongoing technological change in the media, without even raising the subject of how the political landscape has changed fundamentally along with these changes.

* * *

No less than the present does to us, the 1830s and 1840s felt to those living through them as decades of breathtaking change. The 1830s brought not only the first illustrated books and magazines at a price reachable by nearly the entire literate public – itself a category in rapid expansion – but also the launching of the railroad that was to transform transport of both people and goods, so that the press and the rise of architectural tourism in these years might also function under the banner of the Oslo group’s last research rubric, ‘Place and Displacement’.⁵ Part of that radical transformation was the speed with which news and knowledge could be transmitted, recorded and diffused. The second topic might well have been called ‘Place and Diffusion’, even though at the heart of both topics is how architecture is transmitted, not only from the place where it is to an audience at a distance, but equally from an audience of expertise to a broad public. It is not surprising that in the midst of such radical changes as those in what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The Age of Revolution’,⁶ that the nature of the relationship between traditional cultural undertakings and the new conditions of working and living should give rise to vastly different prognoses, hopes and anxieties. So famous is a single line of Victor Hugo – ‘Ceci tuera cela’, ‘this will kill that’, referring to the deathly potential of the printing press for architecture, published in the 1832 edition of his best-selling novel Notre Dame de Paris, arguably the first piece of literature in which the main character is a building – that it was still being quoted out of context and creatively misinterpreted as late as the onset of the twentieth century when Frank Lloyd Wright cited it in his first major public lecture and position taking on the fraught issue of machine production, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, delivered in 1901 at Hull House in Chicago. And, of course, it is cited over and over again today in architectural debates by many who have never read the novel from which it is drawn.⁷ Hugo was describing, however, not the then-present anxiety around great changes afoot in the wake of the July Revolution that had instituted the constitutional monarchy in France and in the newly created nation state of Belgium, but rather a moment of anxiety around an earlier revolution in communications with the invention of printing in the fifteenth century – notably with the Gutenberg Bible of 1456. As is now well known, Hugo proposed that since the printing press made the multiplication of copies of a text possible, it had nearly infinitely increased chances of survival compared to the singular building. For Hugo, then, history bore witness also to the progressive transfer from one cultural medium to another, from one technology to another, of the privileged means of creating the messages as well as the embodiment of the character of an era. What brought the quote into the architectural history of the July Monarchy in France, and into what was thought of at the time as the romantic movement in French architecture, was the discovery by Neil Levine in the 1970s of the close relationship between the poet and novelist and his near-exact contemporary the architect Henri Labrouste, with whom Hugo had shared the chapters dealing with architecture, notably the chapter describing Notre Dame, the medieval physiognomy of Paris, and the dramatic scene of ‘This will kill that’. While Labrouste had some impact on turns of phrase in Hugo’s novel, which added these chapters only in a later edition, it is not at all clear that the prognosis did anything more than reinforce Labrouste’s conviction half a decade later when he was commissioned to create a new building for a library that went back to the Middle Ages – the old monastic library of Ste. Geneviève – that a building could endow the printed word with aura even as the printed word could serve as constituent element of the architecture of a library. Indeed, the library seems almost the counterproof to the argument that architecture would be supplanted by the printed word. Rather it would need to adapt in many ways, most dramatically to the notion that knowledge was not fixed but an expanding network. Although with rapid changes in printing and in postal delivery – much of it taking advantage of expanding railroads, which were often the subject of lengthy coverage in the very magazines they were transporting – it was possible to distribute newspapers and even the newest appearance that is my subject here – illustrated newspapers and magazines – into the home for reading alone or among family members, maybe even aloud. Labrouste was interested in the public space that was the library, the place where members of the public read alone and silently together. If in the original monastic library the primary readers were the members of a monastic community who knew one another, shared values and read from the same canon of books, now the public library was open to people of very diverse backgrounds, interests, purposes, people who would sit next to people they very likely did not know to read books that the other might never read. Here is one of the radical acts of Labrouste, imagining the reading room as a place that not only optimized the quality of reading – much of the research into soaring height, new materials and the new technologies of gas lighting went into creating t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Introduction: A Storehouse of Ideas
• Part One: Architecture and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century
• Part Two: Printed Places
• Index
• Imprint