Léon Vaudoyer

Since the 1975 exhibition of student drawings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the Museum of Modern Art, a fundamental reevaluation of the French academic tradition in architecture has been under way. Long seen as a recalcitrant opponent of modernity, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was, in fact, the seedbed of some of the principle attitudes and themes of modernist debates. Chief among these was the notion that architecture must reflect its own place in history and take part in the ongoing quest for progress. This challenge to the neoclassical orthodoxy of the French Academy in the early nineteenth century was formulated in large part by Leon Vaudoyer (1803-72). Together with Felix Duban, Henri Labrouste, and Louis Duc, Vaudoyer reassessed the relevance of historical architecture to contemporary design. His vision of historicism emerged against a heightened awareness of the political and cultural forces shaping the urbanization and industrialization of the French landscape. At the forefront of historical research and architectural theory from the 1830s to the end of the boom of the Second Empire, these four young Turks left an indelible mark on progressive theories of design well into the twentieth century. With unusual breadth, Barry Bergdoll gives us the institutional settings of Vaudoyer's training and practice; the political strategies of his intellectual mentors, patrons, and clients, and the nature of the constituencies that influenced his commissions; together with a full account of his life and work. The study spans the careers of two generations of Vaudoyers - for Vaudoyer's father A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer was a key figure in the reformulation of the institutions and doctrines of academic architecture during the Revolution, Empire, and Bourbon Restoration. While focusing on these two architects, Bergdoll offers a reinterpretation of the continuities in historicist theory and practice from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and challenges accepted views about the origins of modernism.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.